Oftentimes, data capture will contain errors yielding values with extra spaces, blanks, duplicates, wrong data types or a mismatch of information not properly categorised and labelled. I cannot comprehend the number of times where data issues have caused problems and subsequent efficiency in gathering any meaningful insights.
Occasionally, you may have duplicate values in your dataset that you want to get rid of. In both Excel and the Power Query Editor, this is as easy as pressing a button!
In Excel, simply highlight the data that you want to inspect and in the Data > Data Tools ribbon choose ‘Remove Duplicates’. This allows you to then choose the column you wish to remove duplicates on.
Power Query remembers your steps and will play them back when you want to refresh the data. This means you can clean data on Day 1 in 80% of the normal time, and you can clean data on Days 2 through 400 by simply clicking Refresh.
Power Query in Microsoft Excel is a powerful data connection, cleaning, and shaping technology that is a core part of the Microsoft modern analytics suite of business intelligence tools. Achieving clean data for analysis consumes countless hours for professionals across all industries. With Power Query, your data preparation and cleaning will be transformed, automated, and improved, giving you time for analysis and for driving business impact.
Excel is indeed a powerful tool that doesn’t require core coding (until you are not getting into VBAs). This means that any business or nontechnical individual can gather insights from data using Excel. A dashboard is a consolidated view of visual elements that convey knowledge about the dataset. It supports data validation in the form of filters and sorting methods.