Help With Price-Rent Ratio Maps

[Gil Happy]

Hello,

I have questions about using the Zillow price-rent ratio data-sets to locate profitable areas which to purchase rentals. Looking at the following article on BiggerPockets:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/blogs/6157/69626-nar...

Since I am a complete newbie to GIS (I tried using GRASS GIS) and any GIS platform has an extreme learning curve, so far I have been unable to get all of the components working. However, the article mentions in paragraph 7 about using Excel instead to create charts and graphs. Has anyone had success using Excel, and how difficult was it compared to GIS software?

Please note, this is not my only criteria for finding rentals, but since I am a technology person, I would like to figure this out.

Thanks in advance!