Alternatives to Excel for tabular data? Minitab? Tableau?

Howard said:
I always appreciate when people take the time to help me out.

As for how to proceed from here, I'm a little on the fence...

What I currently have in Excel does work. I'm just not completely satisfied. Particularly with the speed aspect at the moment. So, it won't be a final solution for me long term.
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If you referring to Excel Macro speed, then you can explore another language like java, python or perl to manipulate data in Excel via OLE. This would speed things up quite a bit.
 
DaveV said:
You may already have most of the software what you need already installed on your PC. Depending on what you want to accomplish, my guess is that is would be easiest for you to learn to do SQL queries.

First step is determine what flavor of SQL you are using. Edit the C# code, with Notepad, and seach for "Connect". Most likely you will see a line like "SqlConnect( ..." in which case you are using Microsoft SQL Server; or "MySqlConnection" in which case you are using MySql.

Or, you can see how Excel connects to the database. See https://support.office.com/en-us/ar...er-query-22c39d8d-5b60-4d7e-9d4b-ce6680d43bad
The Excel connection string may indicate what type of SQL server is being used.

Once you figure out what SQL database you are using, you may be able to get more help here.
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Thank you!

I use Microsoft SQL Server 2014. :)
 
userque said:
Yeah...not fun...I think we've all been there. It's a trial and error thing with a lot of research involved.

Since no-programming seems to be your main concern, you're left with applications that replace programming with visual building blocks. There are more, but I think Rapidminer and Knime are the most popular/affordable, my guess only.

Btw, you can incorporate 'coding' into them if you later decide to learn programming.

Just to be thorough, there are some techniques to speed up Excel macros. Less frequent display updates...or none at all (by using the status display instead); targeted recalculations; converting formula cells to values during runtime when the formula will be static...and then doing the reverse just before a recalculation--all via the VBA code, etc.

Good luck and keep us posted!
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Yes. The thing is I actually enjoy the research and trial and error thing quite a lot, normally. Building stuff and developing trading systems is more fun to me than actual trading (the end product/outcome).

It's just that I'm so short on time these days, so I need to spend it wisely. And with something that's already kind of working (although it could need improvement), I need to consider a bit what to do moving forward.

Rapidminer does look very interesting though.

As for speeding up macros, that's a good suggestion to keep in mind. I do have a hunch that the current framework I have could be improved on to give a more satisfactory result without major changes. So it might be that I'll have a talk with my programmers and see what they think about it.

Long term, I do think I'll move beyond this solution anyway though.
 
Regarding Tableau then...

Anyone use it extensively? What would advantages be over Excel?

From what I've read online, the alleged advantage is that Tableau gives better visualizations. While this is a nice additional benefit, I guess it's not my main need.
 
Howard said:
I use Microsoft SQL Server 2014. :)
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I use MySQL and MariaDB, so I can only offer general (as opposed to specific) suggestions for Microsoft SQL Server. My first suggestion would be to find/install a GUI tool to make it easy to do SQL queries. Microsoft has a free tool, SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). Search your PC to see if the guys who wrote the C# code already installed it. If not, you can download it for free from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sq...r-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-2017

You can find a tutorial on SMSS at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sq...server-management-studio?view=sql-server-2017
For the tutorial, you will need the parameters from the SqlConnect statement that you found in the C# code (i.e. the username, password, and database name).
Skip the creating databases part of the tutorial, and concentrate on the simple queries portion.
 
Howard said:
Regarding Tableau then...

Anyone use it extensively? What would advantages be over Excel?

From what I've read online, the alleged advantage is that Tableau gives better visualizations. While this is a nice additional benefit, I guess it's not my main need.
More...

Tableau's internal query engine will speed up your post SQL processing over Excel. Additional views of your data could be an advantage. Also their internal data manipulation engine is closer to excel than of python so it may be easier to use.
 
DaveV said:
I use MySQL and MariaDB, so I can only offer general (as opposed to specific) suggestions for Microsoft SQL Server. My first suggestion would be to find/install a GUI tool to make it easy to do SQL queries. Microsoft has a free tool, SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). Search your PC to see if the guys who wrote the C# code already installed it. If not, you can download it for free from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sq...r-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-2017

You can find a tutorial on SMSS at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sq...server-management-studio?view=sql-server-2017
For the tutorial, you will need the parameters from the SqlConnect statement that you found in the C# code (i.e. the username, password, and database name).
Skip the creating databases part of the tutorial, and concentrate on the simple queries portion.
More...

Thanks, Dave! Appreciate it. :)

dennisa said:
Tableau's internal query engine will speed up your post SQL processing over Excel. Additional views of your data could be an advantage. Also their internal data manipulation engine is closer to excel than of python so it may be easier to use.
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Sounds interesting and worth a try if I can set it up myself.

Thanks for the suggestion. :)
 
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