Instead of purchasing an application, assigning data cleaning to an employee, or hiring a service to scrub your data, for records under a million per sheet, Excel can save you a great deal of time and funds using a variety of functions and features. However, there are many things we can accomplish using Excel functions and features so that you can process our data quickly and effectively. There are many data cleaning solutions out there for a wide range of file formats, data volumes, or budgets. Many estimates show that about 30% of your data may become inaccurate over time ( JD Supra, 2019 Strategic DB, 2019) and even small data sets can be costly to clean, let alone files that are tens or hundreds of thousands of records deep – or much more if you are using large scale databases. The validity, accuracy, and reliability of your calculations depend on your ability to keep your data up-to-date. Consider the issues that can stem from missing or wrong values, duplicates, and typos. In the age of Big Data, companies may spend just as much or more on maintaining the health and cleaning their data as they spend on collecting or purchasing it in the first place. 10.1 Cleaning And Restructuring Data In Excelīefore we can work with our data, we need to make sure it’s valid, accurate, and reliable.
