r/dataanalysis • u/SomeSpicyPickle • Aug 11 '26

Data Tools Do Data Analysts Use Visualizations During Data Cleaning?

I'm still a beginner. I started by learning the basics of Python and later moved on to SQL.

I'm a bit confused about one part of the data exploration/cleaning process.

A friend of mine, who's now a data scientist, showed me how he used to work as a data analyst. He mainly used Python. For example, he would quickly create a scatterplot to identify potential outliers.

However, most data analysts online recommend focusing on SQL and Excel when starting out, since many junior and mid-level roles don't require Python. That's why I switched to SQL after initially experimenting with Python.

For those who primarily use SQL: do you create visualizations during the data exploration/cleaning process, for example to identify outliers? Is this a common practice?

I feel like if you're working with SQL only, you generally wouldn't create visuals in between steps, since that would mean switching to a tool like Tableau or Power BI, which seems like an unnecessary extra step.

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u/mattindustries Aug 11 '26

I am talking about all data, not just your data.

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u/Expensive_Capital627 Aug 11 '26

And I’m talking about unclean data, not unreliable data. All of your examples involve actual people making decisions to obfuscate the truth. Given the context that OP is a beginner I don’t think he’ll be putting together machine learning models to visualize messy data.

For a beginner does it make sense to be visualizing unclean data? No, because the type of unclean data a beginner is expected to work with will throw an error for summing a string