Rachel @NeatData

CPA → Data Analyst| I write about data analytics, process improvement and self-improvement. Help finance pros to eliminate tedious work with analytics toolsets. typeshare.co/rachel Joined February 2022

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Rachel @NeatData

4 years ago

4 Steps to Kill Tedious Work: • Document the process • Find the bottleneck and the boring part • Automate them with whatever tools you can use • Repeat till you only focus on what matters

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Data Analytics is not a technical skill game, it is a business mindset + technical game

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

@thejustinwelsh “Common sense is not so common”

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

All process start clean. Overtime, complexities are built in, technical debts are accumulated, and the whole process becomes a blackbox. Unfortunately, to unwarp the blackbox, we either have to start from scratch again or clean it up bit by bit. It's a never ending fight.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Start using SQL with the following template with SQL Server: select top 100 * from TABLE a left join TABLE2 b on a.col = b.col where 1=1 and a.col1 = 'XXX'

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

If you are doing or want to do Data Analytics, SQL is more important than Python.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

One key difference between real-life learning and school learning: Learning without pre-set structure. In school, you learn based on the structures professor design. Very systematic. In real-life, this takes too long. You try to solve the problem and learn along the way.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Excel is a great tool but not a scalable tool. As a FP&A analyst, you may already experience the issues of Excel: 1. Crash 2. Freeze 3. Not responding These are indicators that you are doing too much in Excel. Time to switch to a more scalable solution.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

If you want to learn data analytics as a finance analyst, learn these 3 skills: 1. PowerQuery 2. SQL 3. Data Model 1h introduction video is sufficient. That simple.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Data Model allows analysts to combine fact tables and dimension tables together without duplicating the data. The connection is called "relationship".

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Habit is the thing that will keep you moving forward everyday

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

What is a good approach to troubleshoot your code? 1. Identifying the place where it goes wrong 2. Go one step backward and see if anything's wrong 3. If not, go one more step backward and check 4. Repeat. If you have a hunch, go straight to it. If many steps, use binary method

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Resolution is easy. Either change your table column to be varchar or cast(XX as varchar) before inserting.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Inserting float into a varchar column can cause troubles in SQL.. If you have a code like 300000, and stored it as float in your table. Since some other codes might be text, the final table stores it as text. When you insert yours into final table, the output becomes 3*10^5.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

When I first learn coding, it's intimidating. Taking Python as an example. It has tons of packages, and each package has hundreds of functions. How could I learn all of them? I don't. I only need to pick the core packages and functions, which are not that many and get started.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Index in SQL table is a double-edge sword. It makes your query a lot faster but it makes DELETE, INSERT and UPDATE very slow. I had experience that 3 index causes an INSERT runtime went up from 5min to 50+min. Always keep the tradeoff in mind and test.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

If you are tired of tedious work, do the following to eliminate them: 1. Breakdown the work into individual steps 2. Document and draw a process mapping if complex 3. Identify the bottleneck or the most boring part 4. Automate 5. Repeat

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

If you just started learning data analysis, don't get too worried about details. Some books/tutorials will teach you all the parameters in a function. Some will throw you with a long list of learning courses. The truth? You only need some core concepts to start.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

Leverage yourself. If you get the same questions over and over again, document them. If documentation is not good enough, make a short tutorial video. Over the time, you will have a collection of materials that you can put together as a course.

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Rachel @NeatData

3 years ago

PowerQuery is a great tool to let you visualize data process step by step. It makes coding less intimidating. You can do all data processing by clicking: Pivot, Group By, Merge (Join), Append (Union), etc. Once you are familiar with the concepts, learning SQL and Python is easy