Six Data Preparation Tasks You Thought Only Programmers Could Handle

We know all too well that manually converting thousands, let alone millions, of rows of data into actionable insights is no walk in the park. For many analysts, making sense of raw data can take hours of manipulating, cleaning, and prepping in Excel spreadsheets using pivot tables, transformations, and VLOOKUPS – especially if they’re less familiar with technical coding languages. Not to mention that manual data prep leaves more room for errors. Ultimately, the hours of labor and risks to data quality are why many lean on developers and IT partners to handle their data prep using SQL or an advanced database coding system.

But in this day and age, shouldn’t data users of all technical skill levels have the capability to easily reformat data sets, rename data fields, filter out content, or compute functions without having to rely on outside teams for help? We think so, and it’s why we developed the self-service tools in Minitab Connect, to help any user shape, enrich, contextualize, and explore their data for analysis. If you thought you needed years of coding experience, your own programmer sidekick, or a thousand more hours in your workweek to take control of your data prep, read on to explore the tasks Connect can help you conquer.

1. CLEANUP, CREATE, AND SAVE MULTIPLE VIEWS QUICKLY

Customization is Minitab Connect’s middle name. The tool’s easy-to-operate commands allow you to quickly rearrange, rename, filter, compute functions, add and remove columns, blend datasets, and more, so that you can view and showcase data in the way you see fit. Even better, “views” allow you to save your preferences to apply for later use and implement even quicker data cleanup in future datasets.