With all these visualization tools available like Tableau, power BI, Altryx etc. Why do people around me still use Microsoft excel extensively?

Answer 1

Microsoft Excel is very different then those tools. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "visualization tools". Excel is not a visualization tool. It is more of an analytical/design tool.

Depending on what your organization does, Excel can be a better fit then those tools.

The BI (business intelligence) tools available today are great at summarizing and presenting information in easy to use forms. They can also be used to do predictive analytics based on certain conditions. The problem is that all of that works within the confines of the application. Someone has to provide data and then map that data to visualizations and use cases to provide value. Usually this is a developer or business intelligence professional working hand-in-hand with the business.

Excel is a great solution for individuals who work with large amounts of unstructured data, or data that may not have any initial meaning in its current form. Meaning, you don't use Excel to make a font bold and color it red. You use Excel to take large chunks of data and summarize, transform or analyze that data.

To put it another way: Developers have SSIS, SQL and Tableau to extract, transform and present the information, a business user without access to any of that, would do all of that same work in Excel.

A couple other reasons why Excel is still going strong include:

1. Financial reporting and analysis (Excel comes with a large amount of Financial functions and tools for doing financial analysis that just aren't available in most BI packages)
2. Free-form transformation (Excel lets users put data literally anywhere they need to put it just by moving it to another cell or sheet. BI Tools aren't always as flexible and require styling adjustments that are beyond the capability of the typical business user).
3. Time savings (if I wanted to create a data grid of information and summarize it in table, the time it would take to do that in Tableau would be double what it would take using Excel).

To sum it up (pros and cons):

BI tools

Pros:

1. Complex analysis of predefined use cases in seconds
2. Easy to consume visualizations and summary data
3. Flexible drill-downs of summary data to aid in root cause analysis
4. Extremely helpful at automating business processes and answering common questions quickly
5. Allows some forms of self-service
6. Dynamic data

Cons:

1. What you see is what you get. Limited interactivity with KPIs and presentation of those KPIs
2. Often requires developer intervention to adjust use cases for analytics in some cases
3. Poor for adhoc analysis or pivoting data in other ways (some tools work better than others for this)

Excel

Pros:

1. Extremely handy for free-form analysis of data
2. Excellent for financial use-cases and formatting data into required layouts for financial reporting
3. Completely customizable since you have direct access to the data
4. Easy to share with users

Cons:

1. Calculations can be incorrect (averages of averages for example), really bad at recalculating data
2. Static and disconnected (can connect Excel to dynamic data sources, but not real-time)
3. Manual (requires user intervention to structure data and provide meaning to the information)

There is a lot more to talk about on this topic for sure and the above is just my experience with both sets of tools. Each has its own use, however the best applications I have found are those that are hybrids and combine the benefits of the business intelligence tools as an initial look, with the ability for users to drill down and interact in Excel if necessary.