Data cleansing is an important activity within Excel and one that we find ourselves doing day in day out, sometimes without even knowing it.
In this tutorial, you will learn the Top 8 Techniques on Data Cleaning in Excel!
So what is data cleansing?
In the words of Oz du Soleil, Excel MVP, it is like “Hercules being sent out to capture the three-headed dog that guards the entrance to hell!”
So you can see that Oz sees that data cleansing is hard work but one that needs to be done in order to succeed in Excel.
We get thrown data at us from external accounting systems, ERPs or downloads from the company server and most of the time it is not imported in an Excel friendly way. This is where you and I come in to clean the data!
You can listen to our podcast episode which was highly entertaining and full of golden nuggets by clicking on below’s image and further down I will show you the My Top Data Cleansing Techniques, which include the ones that Oz uses:
In Excel 2016 it comes built in the Ribbon menu under the Data tab and within the Get & Transform group.
Power Query allows you to extract data from any source, clean and transform the data and then load it to another sheet within Excel, Power Pivot or the Power BI Designer canvas.
One of the best features is to Unpivot Columns.
What that does is transforms columns with similar characteristics (e.g. Jan, Feb, March…) and puts them in a unique column or tabular format (e.g. Month), which then allows you to do further analysis using Pivot Tables which was not possible before unpivoting.
Watch Data Cleaning in Excel on YouTube and give it a thumbs-up!
Follow the tutorial on Data Cleaning in Excel and download this Excel workbook to practice along:
The Find & Replace feature or CTRL+H shortcut allows you to amend your data in seconds. Imagine you had thousands of rows of data that was downloaded from an external system with the wrong date.
A simple CTRL+H will save you heaps of time! See how below.
Say you have a data set and want to make sure that each column contains what it is supposed to.
For example, say you have a column which contains Dates and you want to check that there are no cells which contain Text.
You can easily check this by highlighting that column and pressing CTRL+G to bring up the Go To dialogue box (or by choosing from the menu Home > Find & Select > Go To…)
Then you need to choose Special > Constants and select the constant that you want to find in your column.
In our example you will need to only select the Text box and de-select the other boxes and press OK. This will highlight the cells that contain text and you can begin to format these cells.
Watch the Excel data cleaning tutorial on YouTube and download this Excel workbook to practice along:
In Excel you can have a data set that comes from an external source which isn’t always formatted to your liking.
One of the most common things you may encounter are blank cells in your Excel data which can hinder your analysis, especially if you are using a Pivot Table to analyze the data.
To find these annoying blank cells in Excel you will need to highlight all your data set (CTRL+*) and bring up the Go To shortcut: CTRL+G > Special > Blanks.
Then you can fill in the blank cells with a color red and filter by that same color to drill down to these blank cells and take some formatting action.
Practice this excel data cleaning tutorial by downloading the Excel Workbook:
When you have duplicates values within your Excel Table there is a quick and easy way to remove those values.
The duplicate values could be all over your Excel Table and sometimes it takes valuable time trying to locate those duplicates and then deleting them.
Not to worry, Remove Duplicates to the rescue!
STEP 1: Click inside your Excel Table and select Table Tools > Design > Remove Duplicates
STEP 2: This will bring up the Remove Duplicates dialogue box. Select only the Column box that contains the duplicates that you want to remove and press OK
So there you are, these are just a few data cleansing techniques that you can apply to your data today. Join me and Oz in this Free Power Query & Data Cleansing Webinar to learn some more techniques now:
This completes our tutorial on how to clean data in Excel. What is your favorite data cleansing technique? Let me know by commenting below 🙂
Imported data (text) from a site (list of names). Some of the names have an “~” over a letter. For example, “Nunez” has an “~” over the “n.” I’m having a deal of a time within the power query removing the “~.” Any suggestions here?
Hi John, I’ve found a fast way to remove blank rows is with an add-in like QuikBots for Excel. It has a lot of useful features that make tasks like this go fast.
I am glad you enjoyed these tricks Zaigham 🙂
Cheers,
John
I posted a VBA routine for unpivoting/normalizing data a few years ago. I’ve been told it’s a lot faster than the Power Query method: http://yoursumbuddy.com/data-normalizer/
