This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

Three weeks ago for Five-Minute Friday, I covered the highest-paying programming languages for data scientists based on the results of O’Reilly’s 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey. Two weeks ago, we used Five-Minute Friday to get our definitions of data tools and data frameworks straight so that last week we could dig into the highest-paying data tools and now, this week we’ll wrap this series on compensation up by covering the highest-paying data platforms.

This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

Two weeks ago for Five-Minute Friday, I covered the highest-paying programming languages for data scientists based on the results of O’Reilly’s 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey. Last week we used Five-Minute Friday to get our definitions of data tools and data frameworks straight so that today we could dig into the highest-paying data tools — while next week, in turn, we’ll tackle the highest-paying data platforms. If you get through today’s episode and don’t feel 100% clear about what a data tool is then consider popping back to Episode #522 to clarify.

The most widely-used tool in the survey — used by nearly a third of respondents — was Microsoft’s Excel program for working with data in spreadsheets. Despite its popularity, Excel — along with other click-and-point tools in the survey — was associated with a below-average salary. Specifically, the mean across all respondents was $146k but those who indicated that they used Excel were paid on average $8k/year less at $138k.