Top Apps I Use as a Data Analyst

that nerds in this video we're going to be going over all the top apps that I use in my job as a data analyst that I've accumulated over the years so the first apps we're going to be covering are going to revolve around the top analytical tools specifically if you go to my app data nerd. Tech it Aggregates the top skills in job postings for data nerds right here I have it listed for data analysts in it we have SQL as the most important tool followed by Excel python Tableau powerbi and then R we're going to be going into all of them but let's start with Excel first was it was the first tool that I learned now unless you've been living underneath a rock Excel is a spreadsheet software from Microsoft now you also have other competitors that make similar spreadsheet software such as Google Libra office and even Apple but none of them are as popular as Microsoft Excel and that's mainly due to the fact of the Microsoft ecosystem that many businesses have adapted now if your company or school is not providing you with a Microsoft license you'll need to purchase one I currently mooch off my brother and get a family plan in order to access Microsoft Excel this subscription provides access to other popular tools like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint that I do find myself having to use as well now Microsoft does offer a free version of excel but it's only with Excel for the web and this version of excel is very limiting and a lot of the capabilities that you're going to need as a data analyst aren't included in this so I don't really recommend it now Excel is going to be different depending on the operating system that you install it on right here I'm on a MacBook and I can download Microsoft Excel into my Mac however using Excel inside of Mac OS is very limiting specifically you don't have access to things like VBA power query and then also the new feature of python and Excel so I don't recommend this is how you use Excel as a data analyst on a Mac instead I run a virtual machine inside of my Mac and so it's running Windows locally and this allows me to access the windows version of M Microsoft Excel inside my Mac now I have an affiliate link below for my favorite virtual machine which is parallels you can do it for either a onetime purchase of $130 right now or use your subscription model so that way you get updates to parallels now I like parallels because it has this feature of coherence mode and this allows me to access Microsoft applications inside of my Mac OS I can just go in and select things like powerbi desktop and it's going to load right into my Mac OS and now this gets into the age-old question of whether you should get a Mac or get a PC and I can make a whole video about it which I have here you can check it out I'll give you the shorten version of it if you need anything get a PC it's going to be able to handle all the different apps you're going to need as a data analyst and you're not going to have to use these workarounds like parallel in order to get certain things to work trust me it'll save you time and money all right next up on the list is SQL and I didn't cover this one first because well frankly it's a little complicated now SQL which stands for structured query language is the programming language in order to communicate with the database the complexity with SQL is that there are a host of different databases that you can choose from or that a company may use personally I've used database like SQL server postgress and even big query now these databases where the data is stored is located in either two locations one locally and that's usually for something like training or development or most likely it's located up in the cloud and if so I'm accessing something like big query I can just log into something like Google cloud and then access it through a web browser I can even go as far as querying the database but that's a cloud-based database what happens if we're working with something more open source like postgress or MySQL well these type of databases allow you to download their individual software programs that then allow you to connect to these postgress or MySQL databases whether it be on your machine or on another server for example with postgress I have two different applications the first one has all the different databases in it and I can start up this application and start up different databases to run locally from there I can use postgress software PG admin which you access through a web browser and with this I can then access the database and run queries to connect to this database again locally or even on a server similarly if I'm using something like SQL Server I can use their software SQL Server management studio and from there actually query a SQL Server database but there's a video on top apps that I'm recommending as a data analyst so am I saying you need to download all the different databases and also all the different applications to actually quer those databases no not at all instead I would recommend downloading something like dbeaver which is something I've used in the past in order to access a host of different databases oh and this tool is completely free it not only supports the top three databases of my SQL SQL server and postr but also a host of other ones as well and this application which works on both Mac and windows allows you to connect to databases and even goes as far as far as visualizing it now another option for accessing a database through an application is vs code but I don't recommend this for beginners now VSS code which is a code editor from Microsoft and it's completely free allows you to go in and actually run SQL queries and get your results the problem with this is it's more designed for programming languages like Python and Java and doesn't necessarily have in mind what you need to set you up for success to run SQL queries so that's why I don't recommend it as much for beginners all right moving on to python which is the second language after SQL that I'd recommend learning now python is a multi-purpose programming language we can use it from anything from web scraping to data visualization it can even go as far as machine learning but we're going to stay away from that for this video with python you need two things to get it working on your machine first you need to actually install the core language of python on it and two you need a code editor in order to actually write your python code to then interact with data or whatever it may be now to gety python you can go to something like python.org and download it for free but I don't necessarily recommend this for data nerds instead I'm going to recommend something called the Anaconda distribution which also is a free download but it not only includes python it also includes a host of other different packages and libraries that are perfect for data nerds with this distribution installed you then get this fancy gooey right here that allows you to access python via a multitude of options things like jupyter lab spider and even pie charm but personally I like to use vs code Visual Studio code is completely free and you can download it on Mac or Windows or even Linux now the reason why I'm using vs code for both SQL and python revolves around convenience I have an application that's designed not only to run all my python code but also go as far as to run SQL queries now the secret reason why I'm using VSS code because I Rely heavily on GitHub co-pilot which is an AI assistant to help me and speed up my programming I can just prompt at something like find out the number of rows in this database providing the name of the table from there it generates the code that's needed and from there I just run the cell and get the results that I needed I've become lazy AF in my older age get up co-pilot like most AI chat bots in this day and age are is not free right now I'm paying $100 for the entire year and it's worth every single penny for the time it saves me all right let's skip on down to the bottom of the list and go with the last programming language R I'm not going to lie I haven't used R in years now I'm not dissing on it think it's a great programming language especially for statistical analysis but I find myself wanting to go beyond that and so that's why I rely on python for this language similar to python you need to go through two steps first you need to install the language itself onto your computer and then secondly you need to install the app to actually run R which I'm going to recommend R Studio it's the most popular option unlike in other programming communities where there's a fight over all the different coding editors used the community at R pretty much agrees that this is the best editor for this programming language last thing on R I think it's a great programming language especially for beginners even google. analytics certificate is teaching their students about this language so if you're starting out don't get too deterred with the fight between Python and R pick one and go all right the last two tools on the list are Tableau and powerbi which are both visualization tools for both these tools they provide a dashboard like environment for you to build for others to actually go to and mess around and play with different data when the MacBook M1 chips came out I made this Dash board right here to go through and actually compare the different prices for different models of the MacBooks for Tableau you have two options one is the free version via Tableau public but it's limited in what data can connect to the other is the actual official corporate version of Tableau that usually companies are paying for and you connect to a host of different databases if you're just starting out I recommend just downloading Tableau public now this version is limited you can only connect to a few different types of data sources so if you have something like a SQL database Bas which I find is most commonly what I connect to with Tableau for my job you're not going to be able to do it with this version but if you're starting out heck this is good enough now if you need to connect to something like a database or you want to work and share your work with others then you're going to need the official version of Tableau and this bad boy ain't cheap companies that I've worked for in the past have paid for the licenses for Tableau so I've never really had to pay for it myself once you get it connected you can connect to a host of different sources with that public you're connecting to the files and then inside it you can use a drag and drop type environment to build your different visualizations to share with whoever now although I'm partial towards powerbi overall I think Tableau may be a better option for beginners to data analytics specifically with Tableau public which is free it allows you to then upload your dashboards that you build to the community inside a tableau public so you can not only view different dashboards for inspiration you could sometimes even go in as far as go in and download it so moving on to powerbi which as you guess by now is my favorite now this application is free to to download from Microsoft's website and I say free and quote because there's different catches for pricing behind it similar to Tableau when you get into a corporate environment and need to start actually sharing your dashboards with other it starts to cost money although find not as much as Tableau it cost money nonetheless which for the app itself you don't need to pay any money for but similar to Microsoft Excel it only works in a Windows environment so here again on my MacBook I'm using that parallels virtual machine in order to access powerbi very similar to Tableau it provides a drag and drop type environment for you to go in and actually build your different visualizations for your stakeholder from there if you have a license you can then publish these dashboards to the powerbi service all right there's one more app that I'd add to this list of analytical tools that I think you should be using as an analyst for this we need to go to another survey specifically the 2023 developer survey from stack Overflow they surveyed over 990,000 developers asking them what are the most important apps and tools they use on a daily basis and a tool that I'm finding that I'm using throughout the day multiple hours is an AI Search tool specifically some of the top choices right now are things like chat gbt Bing and Bard not sure why claw didn't make the list but it's also a popular option as well anyway chat gbt tops this list and it's my go-to search tool you can access chat gbt on your web browser or even on your phone which is pretty cool there's three different versions of chat GPT free plus an Enterprise free is free and it's very limited and I don't find it that useful for my job as de analyst plus is the version I go with as it has things like Advanced dat analysis and access to plugins and then finally Enterprise is something a company would Supply you if you needed to work with confidential or restricted data this would handle that I have a couple different use cases of chat gbt the first is just a basic query engine if I get stuck on a problem whether that's coding or Excel I just go right to this tool and query it and it gives me the answer the other reason why I use this tool is for quick ad hoc anal analysis I can provide it a data set and it can quickly dive into analyzing and providing insights from it I can even go as far as providing it visualizations and it show me insights from the graphs that are provided okay for the rest of this video we're not going to be covering any more analytical tools instead we're going to be focusing on tools that I'm using that help me actually complete my job first up is asychronous tools these type of tools are great for helping teams collaborate different times and different locations out of all these on the list I'm partial towards notion this allows me to keep record of all the different ideas and notes I have as you can see here I have the script for this video but the powerful thing about notion is that it's not only great for keeping my notes but it's also great with working with others here I have a notion page for the members of my team to go to and it has access to a bunch of different resources it helps me with sharing the work with my team is here I have a database of scripts and you can just go into one of it and actually see what I'm working on now I've also used this app in order to share any of my analytical findings it's a great way to actually put in different graphs and write your insights next to it and then share it with your team so there's a multitude of different options you can use it now notion comes with free and also paid plans if you're an individual starting out the free plan is going to be good enough personally with me and having a team I use the plus version additionally I've recently upgraded to use notion AI as a own personal little chat gbt assistant right inside of notion since we talked about asynchronous tools we also need to talk about synchronous tools which allow me to interact with other people and my teammates and real time I've used things like Microsoft teams slack and zoom in the past but I'll be honest the funnest one that I love is Discord Discord is free and you can get it on things like PC or Mac or even your phone inside Discord you can have different servers for me I have my own luk baru server where all my teammates can go chill with this I can control all the different sections that are within my server and so we can control the discussions on where they should be had the other great thing about Discord there's a bunch of different free and also paid servers that you can join of like-minded individuals now I don't have a public public server for anybody to join although if you think I should hit me up in the comments but my friend swen over at coding is fun has his own server that he makes public and you can join it you can not only get notified about his uploads but you can also go places to actually talk with other people that have the similar interest all right we're going to get into a bit of a speed round to wrap up these last few apps first is a terminal I'm frequently using this with python and this allows me to programmatically interact with my computer on the back end I use it from everything from managing Version Control with Git to even accessing my database in the cloud on Mac I use iterm 2 which is free to download if I'm inside of Windows I'm using a simar app called Windows terminal which is also free the nice thing about Windows terminal though is it allows me to access a multitude of different types of terminals including Powershell command prompt and here I got aure Cloud shell now I mentioned Version Control and using things like the command line to interact with Git but I find especially for newbies if you're using something like GitHub to manage your Version Control GitHub desktop is an app you want to have it's completely free and it allows you to access all your different repositories and keep track of all the different changes within it and a very to easy to use user interface next up is grammarly and this is like spell check on steroids the most common way to use this is inside your web browser but you can also use it in things like Microsoft Word with it it provides recommendations on not only spelling but also on helping you rewrite your wording to make you sound more clear I'm using it to proofread everything before I send out even things like my link Den post now grammarly has a few different versions you can get you can either get the free which I feel is sort of limited for my need so I actually pay for it using the premium version this one comes down to $12 a month makes me not sound like a babbling idiot so I think it's worth the money all right the last app we're going to be talking about is a screenshot and also video recording app and this is how it capture visualizations for LinkedIn and also for any presentations I have to give and unfortunately this is the only app on the list that is Mac specific and it cost either $8 a month or just do like me and pay one time of $29 with this app I can do things like just screenshot a graph that I want to take and from there go into edit mode I can add a border around it if I want adjust the sizing of it if there's less relevant information I can go ahead and blur that out if I want to annotate on the graph I can just draw a little arrow I can even include a caption and this tool has been great at saving me time of getting the screenshots I need and curating them down to what I need them for all right that's a bunch of different apps that we went through but I find that I'm using these on a daily basis and so I hope you get benefit out of this as well as always if you got value out of this video smash that like button with that I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Luke Barousse

Views: 36,203

Keywords: data viz by luke, business intelligence, data science, bi, computer science, data nerd, data analyst, data scientist, how to, data project, data analytics, portfolio project, sql, excel, python, power bi, tableau, data engineer

Id: ayw72SHkAKY

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024