What are the top five reasons you use EDT?

Question
#1

EDTers, I have to create a demonstration about EDT.
Can you please help me, by listing your top 5 reasons you use EDT? What problem does it solve for you?

Please consider helping me out.

@mklopfer - What about you?

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#2

EDT is almost a secret weapon. I can consolidate multiple spreadsheets faster than any of my coworkers.

Top five reasons I like EDT?

  1. It’s very quick and easy to use.
  2. It’s quick to debug. If at first a report doesn’t come out as needed, just look at intermediate output from each transformation. Sometimes I have little stubs off the main flow where I filter to watch a single record.
  3. Spreadsheets become databases without the need to know SQL. Even if you are comfortable with SQL (I am), EDT is fast and intuitive
  4. It’s cheap for what it does. I got EDT to browse tax district data. I documented abuses in the system and I think I’ve rooted out some crooks.
  5. Andy Brice. Great customer support and active development.

My first use of EDT more than justified its cost.

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#3

EDT is a gem of a tool. In no order

1It has wider applications than one might first think. as an example, I have taken to reading XML files as plain text, and then using the transforms to manipulate data. in this way you can deal with complex structures more easily, IMHO. You will continue to discover applications for it all the time.

2 Javascript inclusion - really simple to use implementation but it expands the capabilities enormously.

3 Very efficient
price matching
matching 4.4m stock exchange prices to codes - 2 seconds

or
dret02aout

Writing out 8.6m accounting records with 95m dataset values, 1.2Gb in less than 17 seconds.

4 It’s crazy cheap. My lawyer charges me the licence fee every 15 minutes she works.

5 Incredibly user friendly. Minimal manual reading time. You should know what to do just by looking at - the mark of well designed software.

6 Support, and Andy B. Amazingly responsive.

@DanFeliciano , I’ve got some slides which may be of some use. Message me if you are interested.

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#4
  1. Automate data entry that requires logic.
  2. To bulk update large spreadsheets, where excel/vba might crash
  3. When power query crashes or takes too long, I pre-format —> PQuery —> Data Model
  • Formatting Vendor spreadsheets from hell
  • Even with a hasty website scrape, I can extract relevant info with a “chunk” of HTML.
  • Then automate to format a a specific format

@DanFeliciano
Who are you presenting this to?

2 Likes
#5

Absolutely confirming and subscribing on all this 5 points. Same here. And I actually have a license for SPSS Modeler and find myself many times using EDT instead because of being so easy and intuitive. The only thing I am missing to put SPSS aside for most things related to data cleaning and wrangling tasks I have to do is for EDT to not forget the column positions every time I have to put a new transformation in the middle or I change slightly the source file column structure. I know @Admin promised he was going to look into this… that would be the key: sometimes is very very annoying to have to fix the entire stream transformations because of little adjustments.

2 Likes
#6

Hi @mk2109, I have a large international consulting firm as a client and they need a tool their consultants can use to aggregate and prepare data in multiple formats for analysis.

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#7

I also am a huge fan and promoter of EDT.

I primarily have used it so for for new software implementations

  1. Preparing the data from the legacy systems for conversion into the new system.
  2. Validating the conversions - comparing the legacy data to the new system data
  3. Validating Parallel Tests - comparing documents from the legacy systems to the new (for example: comparing all paychecks from a pay period created in the legacy system to what would be the paychecks in the new system.)
  4. EDT has got me out of several jams and it seems like there is not much I can not do with EDT and Excel. It is fun and efficient to use!
    Thanks,
    Dave
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#8

My wife is a fractional CFO and does bookkeeping (QuickBooks) and accounting. I use EDT to create an uploadable file to QuickBooks from very crappy downloaded Point of Systems reports.

#9

I understand what you’re saying. I started using EDT I think about a year ago maybe longer and the support team has been very responsive. For example, there are several transforms that I think were based on my suggestions. Or at least I like to think that. ; j

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#10

I use EDT because I process the same reports daily with only a few changes in the numbers of these reports. Once I have the processes saved in EDT, I can use it over and over again without worry of a Excel marco messing up.

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