![]() By Alex Jones, June 2014. As a graduate student in Business Analytics, I have worked the better part of a year to become a giant nerd, excel wizard, big data ninja, data scientist, predictive analytics architect. While the skills I have developed have been invaluable, taking a year of computer science, advanced mathematics, engineering and business classes, is simply not feasible for most people. Although the challenge of collecting and analyzing ' Big Data' requires some complex and technical solutions, the fact is, that most businesses do not realize what they are currently capable of. Specifically, there are a number of exceptionally powerful analytical tools that are free and open source that you can leverage today to enhance your business and develop skills that can genuinely propel your career. Rather than just leave you to navigate the frightening and giant world of IT tools and software, I have put together a list of what I see as the Top 10 Data analysis tools for Business. I picked these because of their free availability (for personal use), ease of use (no coding and intuitively designed), powerful capabilities (beyond basic excel), and well-documented resources (if you get stuck, you can Google your way through). •: Tableau democratizes visualization in an elegantly simple and intuitive tool. It is exceptionally powerful in business because it communicates insights through data visualization. Although great alternatives exist, Tableau Public's million row limit provides a great playground for personal use and the free trial is more than long enough to get you hooked. In the analytics process, Tableau's visuals allow you to quickly investigate a hypothesis, sanity check your gut, and just go explore the data before embarking on a treacherous statistical journey. •: Formerly GoogleRefine, OpenRefine is a data cleaning software that allows you to. What do I mean by that? Well, let's look at an example. Recently, I was cleaning up a database that included chemical names and noticed that rows had different spellings, capitalization, spaces, etc that made it very difficult for a computer to process. I have looked and found one reference to MAC EXCEL 2001 for installing KB276444 which is no longer supported (see below). Does this mean that there is no Data Analysis Took Pack for MAC? Access the data analysis tools To access the data analysis tools, follow these steps: On the Tools menu, click Data Analysis. Fortunately, OpenRefine contains a number of clustering algorithms (groups together similar entries) and makes quick work of an otherwise messy problem. **Tip- to run large files (Google the tip for exact instructions!) •: KNIME allows you to manipulate, analyze, and modeling data in an incredibly intuitive way through visual programming. Essentially, rather than writing blocks of code, you drop nodes onto a canvas and drag connection points between activities.
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