 What is going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we are gonna be discussing the top five data analyst skills. Now believe it or not, the very first video that I ever posted on this channel was almost exactly one year ago and it was on the top three data analyst skills. So I thought it was appropriate to kind of add on to that a year later some additional skills that I think are extremely relevant. Although the quality of that video is not as good as what we have today, I still think that the things that I talked about are still very true. And so we're gonna touch on some of those similar topics but also go on to new things and new skills that I think are even more important than they were one year ago. Let's start off with number one and number one is SQL. Now why is SQL so important and why do I talk about it so much on this channel? It's a lot of different reasons but the very first thing is that you need to be able to retrieve your own data. SQL stands for structured query language and that's how you're gonna query your data that sits in a database. Now the data needs to sit in a database and needs to be stored somewhere and you need to be able to go and retrieve that data. So knowing how to use SQL will not only allow you to query your data and analyze your data however you want to, it'll also allow you to be much more independent so you won't have to rely on anybody else to look at your data. Another big reason to learn SQL is that it is often asked in technical interview questions for data analyst positions. And so if you wanna pass that technical interview and you want to get a data analyst job, I highly recommend learning SQL. Number two is Excel and there are so many things that I get touch on about why Excel is extremely important to know. The biggest thing that I would say is that you can do a lot of data analyst work within Excel itself. You can store the data in Excel, you can reform calculations, you can create charts and graphs all within Excel itself. And that just highlights a small portion of what Excel can do and so it is so extremely powerful. Another big thing that Excel is used for is communicating with other teams and not every other team is gonna be as data smart as you are and so they can't just go into SQL and pull their own data. And so if you wanna communicate with something like a commercial team who really doesn't understand SQL or databases, they just wanna know the data and how it impacts their sales, it is fantastic to just put some data that they need into Excel and send it over to them and have the entire thing taken care of. Number three is Tableau or Power BI. Now yes, of course there are other options besides those but those are the two most popular and two that I have personally used the most. Now you work super hard on digging through the data in Excel and SQL and you understand it really well but it is very hard to show what you can see in the data just by using SQL scripts and looking at it in Excel. You need to be able to visualize that in some way and that's where Tableau comes along. Tableau allows you to create dashboards with graphs and charts with a drag and drop system and it makes it extremely easy to visualize your data. Both Tableau and Power BI have the ability to connect directly to a data source and so if you have some data sitting in SQL server you don't have to export that into Excel, load that Excel into Tableau or Power BI, you can just connect directly to that data source and pull the data in that way. Another fantastic thing about Tableau and Power BI is they can create dashboards online and so you can just get the URL, send that to whoever you want to see it and they can just go online and see it. You don't have to send them an Excel that they have to open up and go to the right tab. It's all in one place that you've created and send over to them. Number four is Python and Python can do a thousand different things but one thing that it can do very well is data analysis. On a relatively large dataset you can do almost everything you need to do right inside of Python. You can extract the data, transform and clean that data and load it into data frames all within Python. You can perform exploratory analysis, visualize all of your data and then also share that data with others all within Python. Another big thing that I love about Python is being able to automate things. So whether that's organizing and processing files or creating an ETL process where I can extract the data once a day, once a week I can do that all within Python. Now you may be thinking, Alex, why don't I just learn Python if you can do all these things instead of learning all those other skills that you've mentioned before? The first reason is that Python takes a long time to learn and especially if you want to learn all the things that we've been talking about it could take months or even years to really get a good grasp on all of these things. The second reason is that although Python is fantastic at all of these things it does have a little bit lower capabilities of these other individual tools. So take for example SQL. Python cannot handle as much data as SQL can handle and so if you have a very large data set SQL is probably what you're gonna have to use in order to be able to handle that much data. Number five is a cloud platform like AWS, Azure or GCP. Knowing a cloud platform is steadily becoming a staple in what you need to know to become a data analyst. Companies are flocking to cloud platforms like never before because of how incredibly efficient they are while also being extremely flexible and scalable. It's actually hard to talk about everything that a cloud platform can do but for data analysts specifically it can store your data whether that's in a database, a data warehouse or a data lake as well as some type of storage container like a blob storage. You're also able to use things like SQL or Python or R right there in the cloud platform on your data and some even have the option to create your dashboards or your visualizations right there in the cloud platform and so it's basically an all in one place online to do all of your work. I hope that that was helpful and I hope that you were able to learn something from this video. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you wanna support the channel be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.