E-BOOK

The Spreadsheet
User’s Guide to
Modern Analytics
Introduction
Spreadsheets have been the go-to for data analysis for
decades. But as data grows in volume and complexity – and
the value of that data increasingly serves as a competitive 03 Challenges of Spreadsheets in the
differentiator – spreadsheet users say they are pushing rows Modern Business
and columns to the limit.

06 Benefits of Automated Analytics Solutions

A recent Nucleus Research survey reveals that 50% of Excel
users are considering migrating to more advanced tools.
09 High-Impact Use Cases for
Automation Analytics
50% of Excel users are considering
migrating to advanced analytics tools. 12 How the Alteryx Analytics Cloud
2024 Analytics Buying Intentions Survey,
Can Help You and Your Team
Nucleus Research
14 Customer Success Stories
If you want to spend more time solving problems and less
time cleansing and blending, consider a new way of getting it
all done with automated analytics.
16 How to Get Started

In this E-Book, you will learn the negative impact of relying on

17 About Alteryx
spreadsheets, how modern analytics can accelerate insights to
help your organization and your career thrive, plus real-world
examples of how automated solutions are delivering value for
global organizations.

2 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

Testing the Limits
of Spreadsheets —
and Your Patience
The challenges of manual
spreadsheets in modern business

3 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

The average analyst spends 26 hours a week using spreadsheets 3. Time-Consuming
for data preparation and analysis. That’s time that could be
Manual data preparation and transformation in spreadsheets
better spent diving deeper into data insights to uncover
can consume hours in the day of an analyst and often requires
business value.
advanced knowledge. Spreadsheets that house armies of formulas
and duplicate entries can easily become a bottleneck in your
We get it. You’ve invested months or years perfecting your workflow. And, as data volumes grow, the speed and performance
spreadsheet game. Still, it’s important to know how the of spreadsheets can diminish, leading to slow calculations,
drawbacks impact your day-to-day work life and the value delayed refresh times, and increased risk of crashes.
you deliver to the business.

1. Limited Scalability
If you’ve worked with large files in Excel, chances are you’ve
experienced freezing, crashing, or no response at all. These
work-stopping problems are becoming more common as
the sheer size and complexity of data grows. It’s more than
a decades-old tool can handle in today’s digital enterprise.
Compared to advanced solutions, spreadsheets also lack
user-friendly interfaces, and the streamlined, repeatable
workflows analysts need to improve problem-solving
and decision-making.

2. Difficult to Automate
If you’re faced with the tedious chore of repetitive tasks,
Excel macros offer a way to automate repeatable processes
by recording and saving a set of actions. However, they
are difficult to understand for anyone but the person
who created them and not easy to change without solid
programming skills.

4 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

4. Complex Data Integration
If you’ve ever had to bring in data from multiple sources,
like a series of CSVs, you know what a pain it can be using
spreadsheets. Aggregating and joining data can be overly
complicated and time-consuming. And when information
is trapped in unusable formats from insulated departments,
there is the added worry of duplicating information or
missing important data altogether.

5. Error-Prone and Risky

The danger of hitting the wrong key or changing a single
cell can trigger a chain reaction that alters data output and
paralyze some analysts with fear. For example, a simple Excel
formula error once famously cost JP Morgan Chase 6 billion
dollars. Simple and unnoticed mistakes can impact everything
from financial forecasting to manufacturing accuracy and
regulatory reporting.

Simple Excel error in

Value-at-Risk model at $6
billion
J.P. Morgan Chase cost
the financial institution

5 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

From Worksheets
to Workflows
The benefits of
automated analytics

6 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

What if you could put the days of cutting and pasting behind 3. High accuracy and low risk
you and instead, automate any report and repeat it forever?
Automation removes the unintentional but inevitable risk
Moving from worksheets to automated workflows can improve
involved in manual processes. It can also improve data quality
the quality of your day and the trajectory of your career. These
and accuracy with at-scale validation of data performed
are the most common benefits users realize with automated
automatically and visually. This helps users quickly assess
analytics solutions.
possible problems, unusual patterns, and required changes.
The ability to validate each step of the data process also helps
stakeholders trust every answer.
1. Time Savings
Moving from manual spreadsheets to automated workflows
significantly reduces time spent wrangling data, building
reports, and communicating insights. Automated solutions
use visual workflows and drag-and-drop features that reduce
manual workloads by up to 80%. The time saved can be used
to uncover deeper insights that make a tangible
business impact.
Our analysts have gone from
report builders to storytellers
and problem solvers."
Automated analytics solutions
Manager of Enterprise Analytics
can reduce manual workloads
by up to 80%

2. Repeatability
Free yourself from the tedious task of producing the same
reports over and over. Automated workflows are reusable and
automatable, reducing repetitive tasks and allowing you to
update your data on a consistent schedule with no additional
work. Workflows also allow all stakeholders or future analysts
to follow the process you created with visual documentation
and transparency.

7 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

4. Scalable and flexible
Legacy tools like spreadsheets are limited to the compute power
of a desktop machine, which can prevent analysts from scaling
data insights quickly and effectively, especially if working with
large datasets. Modern analytics solutions can take advantage of
on-demand cloud computing to process huge datasets quickly
without limitations on size or data format.

5. Empowers all business users

Automation is traditionally accomplished through coding, using
SQL or Python. While this is a reliable approach to data prep
and automation, there aren’t enough developers or coders to
meet the demand for data, and they lack the business domain
expertise to know what needs to be answered and for what
problem. That’s why most business users revert to the comfort
of the spreadsheet.

Automated analytics solutions, on the other hand, are often

no-code and self-service, allowing business professionals to run
and modify their own queries and reports, regardless of skill level.
The democratization of analytics insights and reporting allows
companies to leverage the collective wisdom of the broader
organization and achieve better outcomes faster.

The fact that I could process over 4.5

million rows of data from separate data
sets without writing a single line of code
was just incredible."

Senior Business Analytics Manager

8 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

Deliver a Lot
More Value in
a Lot Less Time
High-impact use cases
for automated analytics

9 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

The use cases are endless when it comes to automation, but Customer Intelligence
if you’re just getting started, you’ll want to make a big first
Understand customer behaviors and preferences better by
impression. These are the areas where automated solutions
automating the collection and pre-processing of customer
offer quick ROI and high impact.
interaction data from multiple sources, including CRM software,
customer service call platforms, website data, and mobile apps.
Automated analytics platforms can cleanse the data by eliminating
Financial Reporting duplicates, rectifying inconsistencies, and standardizing data. Import
the data into your reporting platform of choice to track customer
Automated analytics revolutionizes financial reporting by satisfaction, churn rates, and user patterns.
eliminating manual, highly repetitive, and error-prone processes
across tax, audit, and FP&A. This saves time and empowers finance
teams to focus on high-value activities such as identifying growth
opportunities, cost savings, and strategies for financial decision-
making. The implementation of easy-to-use applications further
streamlines the processing and calculation of financial models.

For the first time, we are able to

understand the customer's full
interaction with the brand at scale
and focus on the highest value
We don’t have to work 18 hours just on customer interactions."
manipulating tax data. We are freed up to
spend the time on value added activities." VP of Marketing Intelligence

Senior Business Analytics Manager

10 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

Marketing Analytics Many More
One of the most challenging aspects of tracking and analyzing The sky is truly the limit. For any analytics report involving multiple
marketing analytics is pulling in data from multiple sources and data sources and different file formats, automated analytics
standardizing it all. Marketing teams can use automated analytics solutions make it easy to connect, blend, prep, standardize, and
solutions to automate the ingestion of marketing data from automate the reporting process.
platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and email campaigns
and clean the data, filter out duplicate or irrelevant information,
and standardize formats. Refined data sets can be imported into a
dashboarding platform to track things like campaign performance,
customer engagement, and ROI.

Product Development
Meeting customer expectations with compelling product
experiences is challenging but critical to succeed in a hyper-
competitive market. Automated data insights can help improve
every stage of product development, from accelerating innovation
to optimizing the post-purchase customer experience. This
strategic use of analytics ensures a more agile and competitive
approach in product development processes.

Rather than relying on Excel to learn about

what has happened in the past, we are now
able to focus on business outcomes at a
quicker pace."

Director of Digital Analytics

11 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

A Modern Solution to
a Decades-Old Tool
How the Alteryx Analytics Cloud
can help you and your team

12 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

AI-powered, self-service analytics platforms that were once a ‘nice
to have’ are becoming a critical tool to help all business users work
with large amounts of complex data, automate manual tasks, and
reduce the risk posed by spreadsheets.

The Alteryx AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics enables users to

profile, prepare, and orchestrate data for analytics and machine
learning. Through its no-code/low-code drag-and-drop interface, it
can reduce the time, technical skills, and costs required to build and
automate data pipelines and analyze data.

Alteryx streamlines the process of connecting to new data sources,

making it easier to join and modify data and create visualizations.
This enhances efficiency, usability, and data quality, offering users
the potential to experience analytics up to 10x faster.

One customer who has benefited from this approach is

PepsiCo. While using spreadsheets, PepsiCo’s CPFR team
was struggling to quickly turn around sales forecasting
reports that would determine how much and what
quantities of product were needed for their largest retailers.

Their huge volumes of inventory data were breaking their

spreadsheets, not to mention the dollars wasted in the time
they lost or the occasional error that slipped through. After
using the Alteryx Analytics Cloud, the PepsiCo CPFR team
saw tremendous results—reporting time has been reduced
by 70% and build time has been reduced by as much as 90%.

13 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

From Pain Points
to Possibilities
Real stories from real customers

14 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

Organizations globally are leveraging the Alteryx AI Platform for
Enterprise Analytics to improve revenue performance, manage costs,
and mitigate risk.
Alteryx is like Excel but supercharged. A powerhouse tool
Don’t take our word for it. These are just some of the real-world — it’s perfect for managing data without the hassle of
examples of how customers are using Alteryx to increase speed to crashes. It’s about working smarter, not harder."
data insight and free up time to spend on strategic initiatives.
Senior Manager of Tax Technology

• As part of a BI modernization initiative, Nielsen adopted Alteryx to

democratize analytics and provide faster time to value.
• The result: Nielsen automated more than 2,000 manual processes
and has over 250 business users who are empowered with
self-service analytics. • SaskTel utilizes Alteryx to automate inventory forecasting and improve
demand planning.
Automated 2000+ manual processes • The result: A manual inventory report that used to take one year to
develop can now be completed in three minutes using Alteryx.
READ CUSTOMER STORY
Reduced inventory data processing from 1 year to 3 minutes

READ CUSTOMER STORY

• Siemens implemented the Alteryx code-free, automated platform to

eliminate spreadsheets, consolidate data, and gain full visibility into the
company’s data.
• The result: Thousands of hours saved and dozens of new insights created
• Real estate services firm CBRE uses Alteryx to predict tenant occupancy
through data and process automation.
churn, identify trends, and uncover business opportunities.
1000+ hours saved with analytics automation • The result: Alteryx replaced 60+ Python scripts with an automated data
pipeline, reducing manual monthly processing by 50%.

READ CUSTOMER STORY

Reduced monthly data processing time by 50%

READ CUSTOMER STORY

15 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

It’s Your Time
to Shine
How to Get Started

With Alteryx, getting started with automation is easy. You can ingest and
prepare data from anywhere and upskill with self-service analytics.

Get started with a 30 day free trial or create value on day one with
prebuilt analytic workflows using our Starter Kits.

Check out The AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics to see how we do

automation. And don’t forget to search the Maveryx Community to
spark new ideas and learn from the best.

16 THE SPREADSHEET USER’S GUIDE TO MODERN ANALYTICS

About Alteryx
Alteryx powers actionable insights with the AI Platform for Enterprise
Analytics. With Alteryx, organizations can drive smarter, faster decisions with
a secure platform deployable in on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments.
More than 8,000 customers globally rely on Alteryx to automate analytics to
improve revenue performance, manage costs, and mitigate risks across their
organizations. To learn more, visit www.alteryx.com