How do I commend or respond to the two posts below by add advantages of two other functions, pivot tables, or validations and explain how they would add value to your classmates' examples.

1. The toolset that I find most valuable is the pivot table. The pivot table is a simple way to analyze large amounts of data. It allows you to manipulate data to make it easier to read and analyze. By doing that, you also can pick up pattern recognition on the data you are analyzing. The pivot table allows a business to make quick decisions without sacrificing the precision of quantitative certainty. Taking a large amount of data and manipulating it through the pivot table saves analysis time, as the table is doing the work for you. (Jason)

2. Database analytics are central to business decisions. It is important to run scenarios and consult your databases for empirical data to ensure that leaders are making informed decisions.

One of the most useful tools a company could use is the lookup functions. It is used to find specific information within an excel database. For instance, VLOOKUP finds values in the left column and returns the value in the same row as another that the user specifies. HLOOKUP does the same but in the top row of a table and returns the values in the same column from a row the user specifies. (Evans, 2020) This is the most important because an analyst is not going to get very far analyzing data if it cannot be located within a large database.

These functions can be helpful to a manufacturing company manager wanting to know the performance metrics of a specific part. The data admin would gather this information by looking up the part number in the database and viewing the associated performance indicators. This can be crucial when deciding whether or not to discontinue the manufacture of the part in question. (Dulce)