Page 8 - Understandinging Forensic Technology Landscape

Strengths and limitations of Excel

Strengths Limitations

Commonly taught in business education or in online New and less-skilled users often skip validation and
tutorials. It is relatively inexpensive and easy to quality control. Excel’s ease of use may sometimes
get started. create a false sense of comfort with inaccurate
analyses.

Excel handles most small or medium-sized data Useable rows and columns and overall file size are
sets with ease. limited. Excel 2019 is limited to 1,048,576 rows by
16,384 columns.¹ Memory and computing limitations
may also affect larger spreadsheets.

Relatively intuitive data analysis tools, including filters Improper data manipulation can easily corrupt data
and pivot tables. without leaving an audit trail. Validation and quality
control of analyses should be considered.

Data can be easily exported to a variety of other Not self-documenting. Analytical steps can be difficult
analytics tools allowing more sophisticated to trace or reproduce. Debugging or tracing work
visualizations and analyses. steps may require analysis of embedded formulas
or hidden cells.

A wide variety of data types and formats can be Best for static data downloads. Newer versions
imported into Excel, including some conversion of Excel improve the handling of data feeds, but
of data in text format. other software tools more capably handle live or
semi-continuous updates.
Analysts should validate source data. Sometimes,
significant work is required to prepare inconsistent,
non-conforming or improperly formatted data
for analysis.

Recent versions of Excel are increasingly capable of Specialized analytics tools, including Microsoft
incorporating features from other tools, such as data PowerBI, Tableau, and others may be more efficient,
visualization and graphing, logic and programming. robust and capable than similar features in Excel.

1 Excel specifications and limits, Microsoft Office, support.office.com/en-ie/article/excel-specifications-and-limits-1672b34d-7043-467e-8e27-269d656771c3, accessed July 22, 2019.

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