If you’re already using Power BI or Tableau, you’ve probably noticed both platforms have added significant AI capabilities in the past two years. Microsoft added Copilot to Power BI; Salesforce brought Einstein AI deeper into Tableau. Both promise to let business users ask questions in plain English, generate visuals automatically, and surface insights without needing … Read more
Most small businesses have more revenue forecasting capability than they realise. If you have a spreadsheet with 12 or more months of revenue history, you have enough data to produce a reasonable projection — and AI tools can help you both run the numbers and interpret what they mean. This isn’t about building a complex … Read more
A few years ago, turning a spreadsheet into an interactive dashboard meant either learning a BI tool, hiring someone who knew one, or settling for a static chart. Now you can upload a CSV to several AI-powered tools and have a working, interactive dashboard in under ten minutes — no SQL, no drag-and-drop chart builders, … Read more
If you manage a sales team, you probably produce some version of a weekly pipeline report. And if you’re honest about it, you probably spend more time pulling that report together than it deserves — exporting data, building the summary, writing the narrative, sending it to the right people. It’s one of those tasks that’s … Read more
The promise sounds appealing: instead of building dashboards in Looker or Tableau, you just ask an AI what you want to know and it tells you. No SQL, no drag-and-drop report builders, no waiting for your data team to make a new chart. Just a question and an answer. Parts of this are real. AI … Read more
Most business problems don’t appear suddenly — they build up gradually in data that nobody is watching closely enough. A customer churn rate that’s been creeping up for six weeks. A fulfilment error rate that doubled two months ago and nobody noticed. An ad campaign whose cost-per-click quietly tripled while everyone was focused elsewhere. Anomaly … Read more
Regular spreadsheet tools have a ceiling. You can get a lot done in Google Sheets or Excel, but once you need live data connections, AI-assisted analysis, or the ability to run code inside your spreadsheet, you start running into their limits. Rows and Quadratic both try to push past that ceiling — but they take … Read more
If you use Google Sheets regularly and want AI built directly into your cells rather than copy-pasting between a spreadsheet and ChatGPT, two tools worth knowing about are Numerous.ai and Sheet AI. Both let you write AI-powered formulas that work like regular spreadsheet functions. Both run inside Google Sheets without requiring you to leave the … Read more
SQL is one of those skills that’s genuinely useful for anyone who works with data — and genuinely annoying to learn if your job isn’t primarily technical. The syntax is finicky, joins are confusing, and date functions seem designed to make you feel stupid. Natural language SQL tools aim to solve this: you describe what … Read more
Messy data is one of those problems that sounds boring until you’re three hours into manually fixing inconsistent date formats across 4,000 rows. If you’ve ever inherited a spreadsheet where the same city is spelled four different ways, or where dates are formatted differently depending on who entered them, you know how much time data … Read more