Tools to perform business analysis

It is essential for a business analyst to have hands-on knowledge of basic tools to perform his/her analysis effectively. Here is a list of some popular tools:

1. Office Suite - MS Office (word, excel, powerpoint), Open Office, Google Sheets
   
2. Requirement Tracking & Management – JIRA (Atlassian Suite), Rally, Mingle, Assembla, Rational Suite, TFS (Team foundation server), IRIS, iPlan
   
3. Wireframing/Mockup – Axure, HotGloo, Balsamiq, Adobe XD, Proto, Sketch
   
4. UML Diagrams – MS Visio, Smartdraw, Lucid Chart
   
5. Databases – MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Postgre
   
6. BPMS - Bizagi Modeler, BPMN.io, PEGA, Oracle BPM, Zoho, TIBCO
   
7. Data Analysis – Excel, R, Python, SAS, Splunk
   
8. Data Visualization - Tableau, Qlikview, FusionCharts, PowerBI
   

Knowledge of at least one tool from each category can give you an edge over other analysts in the industry.