1

Hi all,

I using re:dash for a about a week now to see if it can be used in a (small) company to help replace
some excels with various data reporting coming in manually. I have some excels wich a few users type in some numeric mostly data , and they produce some calculations that the boss needs to see and make decissions. I’m not very SQL familiar and I did hit walls in order to make some querys which in excel is very easy to produce (but very hard to manage!) . Is re:dash a tool for this kind of job or I’m wasting my time ? Will I be able after some studying to replace my current nightmerish excel with it and produce ways to input data into the database and produce the results? I know it’s generic but I want to see if this is the right tool for this kind of job.

Thanks in advance
George

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Not knowing the exact situations, it’s hard to give any accurate suggestions.
I’d like to share some of my thoughts.

Google spreadsheet instead of Excel?

  • Excel pros
    • most people are familiar with it
    • some basic data manipulations are easy (some difficult though)
  • cons
    • the download -> update -> upload and share process is stressful
    • when someone made a edit mistake, it could be disastrous
    • visualization is limited and not really easy to use

Since the data you use are manually inputted, I suppose data size is not big. Google spreadsheet might keep the pros and solve the cons. And redash do support using google spreadsheet (without using any SQL). So you could try the combination.

Is sql necessary?
It is for redash, but not quite so for some other tools, such as tableau, metabase, superset.
I personally think GUI based tools works well for small-sized dataset and simple need for visualization.

db migration?
If Google Spreadsheet migration is not really applicable, I would expect your excel to be really nightmerish. The remain choice would be migration your main datasource to some db.
In this case, I believe both migration to db + BI tool and continually using excel would be painful. It depends on which pain you would prefer.
The former choice would pay off in the long run if

  • the business or the data-driven planning need is growing
  • you would like to have more experience and skills on the technical side

Hope this helps.

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Thanks for your suggestions I appreciate. Data comes in manually now but I I have to check also if there is possibility to parse emails (since this way they come in ) from a mailbox and feed them to a database (by enforcing the senders to send in predetermined format).

More trouble !!