Just a note here on the use of R for statistical analysis, data profiling exercises as well as adding perspectives (establish context) to data to be used in visualizations.
R is a language and environment that is easy to learn, very flexible in nature, and also very focused on statistical computing, making it great for manipulating, cleaning, summarizing, producing probability statistics (as well as, actually creating visualizations with your data), so it's a great choice for the exercises required for profiling, establishing context, and identifying additional perspectives.
In addition, here are a few more reasons to use R when performing any kind of data or statistical analysis:
- R is used by a large number of academic statisticians, so it's a tool that is not going away.
- R is pretty much platform independent; what you develop will run almost anywhere.
- R has awesome help resources. Just Google it and you'll see!