They are merely serviceable for all the above spreadsheets are not the BEST tool for ANY job, whether that’s data manipulation and cleaning, visualization, or analysis. In other words, the calculations you use in spreadsheets can help you in Tableau, R, SQL, or Python as long as you’re learning processes and things you can do with data and not “mechanics” of doing these things in excel alone
a lot of functions you learn to use are somewhat translatable into other tools / skills if you learn how to logic, not just how to follow steps. Someone somewhere is going to give you spreadsheets and say, “crunch” - at minimum, learn how to extract data from xlsx to csv (which is about 1 minute of googling to learn) loads of people already know how to use them at a “proficient” or higher level The main advantages of excel and other spreadsheet software (including Google docs, libre office, and even Apple’s Numbers) are: Depends on your company and the tools you have access to.Įxcel can be decent for data exploration, but it’s poorer than many tools for that purpose.