Question

Are spreadsheets a good tool for business analytics? Why or why not?

Also, discuss the ways in which you have seen spreadsheets used, and how you have used them. State whether the setting was personal or business related. Remark as to whether you have used functions or formulas in your spreadsheets.

Answer 1

No, spreadsheets are not a good tool for business analytics as:

· They cannot handle huge quantity of data or Big data

· They can handle two dimensional data and for multiple dimension, it is not possible to work in spreadsheets

· The security aspect is limited as data or spreadsheet can be easily copied to other systems

· The spreadsheet don’t have business intelligence tool and are useful for simple calculation

I have used spreadsheets mainly for business related activities which includes:

· Creating budget for the function = Basic table function and Pivot to segregate and provide insight

· Building charts for information about spend segment = Used Bar charts, Line charts, Pie charts for segmenting the information

· Capturing data like machine downtimes, reasons etc. which was later used for Pareto analysis

I used both function and formulas for calculation.

Formula includes addition of cell, multiplication of cell etc.

Function includes SUM, SUMPRODUCT, AVERAGE etc.

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