There is data everywhere you go. Every second, the internet transmits GBs of data from one place to another. Businesses are also constantly collecting data through websites and other such means. The presence of so much data can make management difficult especially due to the possibility of incorrect data.
Data wrangling makes it easier to control and manage such issues. Back in the day, one had to check data manually but now thanks to data wrangling tools, it can be done automatically.
Every business needs to correct the data it has. It doesn’t matter how careful you are, data always contains problems from organizing issues to mismatches. In this article, we’ll talk about data wrangling including tips to find the best data wrangling software and the importance of data wrangling in a business environment. Without any further ado, let’s get started:
What Is Data Wrangling?
Data wrangling is the process of str
ucturing, enriching, and cleaning raw data to make it more presentable and hence easy to use and manage. It makes decision making easier by giving users a chance to understand data in a better manner without having to put a lot of effort.
Data wrangling is quite in demand today. In fact, even small businesses use data wrangling software as they have realized the importance of structured data. According to some reports, the demand for data wrangling tools is on a rise due to the growing complexities in collecting and recording data. Data is becoming more and more unstructured and diverse. This means data scientists have to put in more effort into organizing it. With data informing a large number of business decisions, users do not have much time to wait for prepared data. This increases the need to have a self-service tool, i.e: a data wrangling software.
The process includes mapping or converting data from one form to another for better understanding and management.
How Does Data Wrangling Work?
Data wrangling process can be quite complicated. It’s broken into six steps. They are:
Step # 1 – Discovering Data: It is important to understand your data or what it contains before diving deeply into it. How you analyze data depends largely on the type of data you have. This is why it is important to be clear about the purpose of data wrangling. This would make it easier to clean and comprehend data. For example, if you have an online store and you want to wrangle customer data, then you can break it into location, price, etc.
Information broken into smaller clusters will make it easy to grasp the data. You will not have to spend hours understanding what a specific number or outcome means.
Step # 2 – Structuring Data: Since raw data comes in a variety of sizes and shapes, this step is important to organize it. Organizing makes analysis easier. Due to the availability of a lot of data, a single row may be converted into multiple columns and vice versa. While it may sound like more information, structuring actually allows for easy understanding and grasping of information.
It makes computation easier as well, allowing businesses to analyze data in a quick manner and reach a decision.
Step # 3 – Cleaning Data: It is common for data to contain outliers and errors. This process involves getting rid of such data so you only have clean data to take care of. Data cleaning is very important as unclean data would not give you true information. Imagine looking at state data wrong. You could be working on California data as CA, but if you enter even a single field incorrectly as Calif. or other such alternatives, you will not reach a correct figure. There will be missing figures which would make the final number unreliable.
Data cleaning changes null values and implements standard formatting throughout the data to improve quality.
Step # 4 – Enriching Data: This process involves stocking data and strategizing about the augmentation of additional facts and figures so that there are no issues when you gather more data to add to the existing information. This is a very important step because companies continue updating the information that they have. New users keep coming in and the information regarding old users need to be updated as well. All such changes must be made in the existing data so that it can paint a true picture of the circumstances.
Think about what new data you can derive from the information you already have. Also, think if having more information would make the decision-making process easier and more reliable.
Step # 5 – Validating Data: Validation includes checking for security, consistency, and quality. Some examples include confirming the accuracy of different fields throughout the data or double-checking the distribution of attributes. According to most experts, this is the most complex process of data wrangling.
This is of huge importance especially because it can be very difficult to manually validate data. This is why you will need the assistance of a professional data validation tool.
Step # 6 – Publishing Data: This is usually the final stop in the data wrangling process, after which you will be able to use the validated, structured, and cleaned data. This step involves preparing data for use by a specific software or user. It also includes documenting the steps taking to wrangle the data. Data gurus understand that the success of data largely depends on how it can be used and utilized.
Different tools may use different techniques to wrangle data. Make sure to shop around for the right data wrangling software to enjoy all the benefits of validated data.
What Are the Benefits of Data Wrangling Software?
Look at the facts to realize the importance of data wrangling. According to an O’Reilly’s 2016 Data Science Salary Survey, data scientists have to spend about 69% of their time analyzing data. Similarly, about 53% of experts spend their time cleaning the data. A large portion of this data is in raw format, hence not usable.
Data wrangling can make the job easier by providing a bunch of benefits including:
- Deeper Intelligence: Data wrangling allows you to study more data as it not only clusters data into a proper and presentable form but also gathers information from multiple sources giving you more material to base your judgment on.
- Time Saving: Time is of the essence when it comes to running a business. Manually correcting data can take a lot of time even for small businesses.
Imagine a delivery restaurant that has to work with a few dozen clients. It will have to keep information related to all its clients. This includes delivery addresses, numbers, names, preferences, etc. This is too much information to maintain and access.
Data wrangling helps ensure this information is stored in an actionable manner so that businesses can turn to it whenever needed.
- Fewer Efforts: With a data wrangling software by your side, you will not have to put in effort into organizing or collecting data. The software will do the job, allowing you to concentrate on other tasks.
- Improved Decisions: With better data in place, businesses will be able to make informed decisions. The information that you have will be reliable and correct, hence you will have a higher chance of success.
- More Work: When you have a data wrangling software taking care of the data in hand, you will be able to use your time to complete other tasks. Data scientists will not have to manually take care of data.
How to Select the Best Data Wrangling Software?
There are a number of data wrangling tools out there. It is important to work with a software that’s affordable and efficient.
We take great pride in our award-winning data cleansing and matching software that can increase the accuracy of your data. It’s suitable for all kinds of businesses and customers. It provides quick and reliable results and is very easy to use.
Upload your data files and let the tool do its job.
Some of its amazing features include:
- Word Manager
- Gender/Name Splitting
- Address Splitting
- Data Matching Reporting
- Data Profiling/Stats
- Golden Records and Survivorship
- Automation
Very few data wrangling tools out there offer such amazing benefits at such an impressive price – starting at low as $999. If you are still not sure of WinPure Data Cleansing and Matching Software then try our free trial today.
