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Excel is exceptionally good at telling you what the shape of your data is. I love being able to just turn something into a table and then see the distinct values as a filter.

Sure, SQL and most environments can tell you distinct values of a column and their counts, but they are much slower and more cumbersome to explore with. I often start out with broad filters then go through many more specific ones depending on what I see from the first filter.



Another great tool for data exploration is visidata! This is a good example of what it can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU


Visidata is great. My main problem is that I use it so infrequently so it's hard to build up the muscle memory to use it really effectively.


Isn't all excel data tabular in shape?




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