Page 7 - Understandinging Forensic Technology Landscape

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets in the forensic context In many situations, Excel is used as the front-end or
back-end of work performed in other applications.
Microsoft Excel (Excel) is often considered the swiss Because of its widespread use, most business analytics
army knife of forensic accounting tools. Although there tools integrate well with Excel. Sometimes, Excel is used
are other spreadsheet tools, such as Google Sheets or as a bridge to software tools that have more capability
Apache OpenOffice, Excel is one of the most widely or are more appropriate for the specific task and the
used tools in forensic accounting practice and offers a nature and size of the data set. For example:
wide variety of applications.
• Excel can be used to analyze a subset of a larger,
more complex dataset. Data can be extracted from
Tools and techniques enterprise applications, like SAP or Oracle, for analysis

There are several competitors to Excel, most of which in Excel.
are useful for smaller data sets. Google Sheets is a free, • Data downloads from various sources can be pulled
cloud-based alternative. Google Sheets is frequently into one or more Excel workbook tabs, allowing the
used in situations where multiple users collaborate on synthesis of the data.
the same worksheet. • Data in Excel can be uploaded or linked into other

Other tools are sometimes better for the manipulation of analytics tools for dashboarding, graphics, visualization,
large data sets or relational database analyses. Excel’s or relational data analysis.
specifications reflect that it can analyze up to 1 million • Images or embedded data objects from Excel can be
records, but a computer’s memory and computing pasted into documents or presentations.
limitations may reduce performance for data sets
approaching this size. Microsoft PowerBI, programming
languages including Structured Query Language (SQL),
Python and R and other big data tools, are frequently used
together with Excel to analyze larger data sets. Big data
tools are further described in the Data Analytics section of
this guide.

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