Data cleaning is a waste of time. If the data had been collected properly in the first place there wouldn’t be any cleaning to do, and you wouldn’t now be faced with the prospect of weeks of cleaning to get your dataset analysis-ready. Worse still, your boss won’t understand why your analysis report isn’t on his desk…
I’m sure you’ve all heard about the party game Chinese Whispers, where a message is given to a person at one end of a line and is then whispered to the next, then the next, and so on until it reaches its eventual destination at the other end. Typically, small changes in the message occur…
Let’s face it, we’ve all been there. We’ve had a dataset that needed cleaning before we could start analysing it, so we started eyeing the data and fixing errors as we spot them. We convinced ourselves that it wouldn’t take long before we could get it done, then we can get on to the real…
Let’s say you have collected your data and have a nice, clean dataset. You’re ready to start doing your analysis. Hold on there cowboy, not so fast. You wouldn’t start building your house without putting the foundations in place, would you? The last thing you need is for all your hard work to come crashing down because…
Here’s a joke about how to clean data: Did you know that Data Scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning data and the other 20% complaining about it? Yeah, you’re right – it’s not funny. But then there isn’t anything funny about data cleaning. It’s not just the Data Scientists that complain about it though, it’s pretty…
Cleaning numerical data can take a ridiculous amount of time, but learning to use Excel COUNTIF can save you a lot of time and hassle……and having to explain to your boss why that analysis report isn’t on his desk yet, a mere 2 weeks after he gave you the dataset! Bless him, he doesn’t understand. He…