Microsoft Excel

Excel is the de facto data analysis tool in the business world. At the Grinder, we often refer to it as "the swiss army chainsaw". It's got plenty of limitations and quirks, it's not the most elegant tool around, and there's plenty of ways, but you can get a huge amount of work done with it despite all its quirks.

Excel, of course, can do plenty of things with just the spread sheet. Pivot tables, all the lookup functions, random numbers, conditional formatting, pulling data from external sheets and data sources, the list goes on and on.

However, at the Grinder, we want to go beyond the spreadsheet, and take even more control over our data. To do this, we'd have to use the Macros and the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) framework that comes included with MS Office.

Beyond even VBA, there are other ways to hook into Excel, that would let us work in Python (or other general purpose languages). Which we'll get to later.