hello, I work at a small biotech startup and we're looking for a third party software solution to enable data analysis and visualization by 'non-experts' (i.e. no SQL required). Our data consists of some sequencing data as well as more "traditional" chemistry and biology data (e.g. in vitro experiment data, chemical compound properties). We've heard great things about Spotfire, but because of the cost, we're also starting to look at other tools, such as Tableau, and Looker. The latter seems to be more for BI than science, however. Anyway, looking for impressions from anyone who has experience in using any of these tools for scientific data (or any other tools not on this list). Thanks!
You may want to take a look at Knime.
Excel can be surprisingly powerful, if considering features, which would otherwise rarely be used by bioinformatics or computational people (and one could even have tabs dedicated to visualization, which are updated when data is added to other tab,...)