During a university project on retail sector performance, I ran liquidity and profitability ratios through a general-purpose BI tool called Tableau. It looked great. The charts were clean and my professor was initially impressed. Then she asked me to show the underlying calculations.
Presentation vs. analysis
Tableau is a visualization tool. It does not natively compute financial ratios or maintain the accounting logic behind them. I had manually entered pre-calculated numbers and dressed them up. When questioned on the methodology, I had nothing to show. A purpose-built tool like Wisesheets or Stock Analysis on Excel would have surfaced those calculations automatically from structured data.
What beginners often misread
There is a difference between a tool that displays financial data and one that processes it. Many people starting out pick software based on how polished the output looks rather than whether it actually supports the analytical steps in between.
After that project, I started asking one question before committing to any tool: does this software understand financial statement structure, or does it just take numbers I give it? For ratio analysis specifically, that distinction matters a lot. Getting burned on a student project is recoverable. Getting burned in a client-facing report is a different story.