Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Data Cleaning Tools In Microsoft Excel

We held a webinar on Data Cleaning in Excel. Well, there was some technical glitches but I think we have managed to find out the root cause and way around the issues to prevent similar glitch in future ones.

You can watch the video of the webinar here, might want to fast forward the glitched part.



As a compensation, I will be taking you through the crux of what I shared in the webinar with plenty easy to follow screenshots.

1. Text to Column
Sometimes, you copy data from other applications into Excel and they don't get arranged the way you want. Maybe you copied customer data records with first name, last name and email and instead of Excel putting them in different columns/fields, you get them sandwiched into one field. How do you easily remedy that?

Well, I am happy to introduce you to Text to Column.





To fix this, go to Data Menu, Text to Column and in a matter of 3, 4 clicks you are done. Even for a hundred thousand records table.





2. TRIM
Got text data with the spacing irregularly done? No worries, meet TRIM.

It can turn records that look like this:

Into this pleasant looking one:




3. PROPER and UPPER
Got text or names written with all lower case or terrible mix of the cases? Time to fix them looking Proper or all in UPPER.





4. Go To Special, Blanks
There is something definitely special about Go To Special beyond its name.

Have you got records arranged disorderly and you want to align the arrangement. Take for example, the one in the screenshot below.



With Go To Special, select Blanks. Then right click on the highlighted Blanks and Delete, shifting cells to the left. And, voila! It is done!











5. Removing Duplicates
Say you have a table with duplicate records. How do you remove the duplicate entries, leaving one unique record?

You guessed right: by using remove duplicates.

Here is a sample problem to attack.



First, we'll make Excel show us the duplicate records using conditional formatting. It's not a requirement. Just doing it for fun or maybe you really want to see the duplicate records before deleting them. 




Now let's remove the duplicate values. Go to Data Menu, Remove Duplicates.



See result below. Sparkling clean. No more greasy duplicates.



6. Text 2 Number
Sometimes, you import or copy numeric data into Excel and they show up as Text. For you to run regular calculations, with peace of mind, on them you need to convert them back to numbers. 

If you are lucky, which is the usual case, Excel will show you a diamond tool tip to guide you in converting the Text numbers to Number numbers😀.

Say today you weren't that lucky. No diamond tool tip. How do you proceed, and considering there are hundreds or thousands of records to fix at once.

Well, use what I call Text 2 Number.

Just type 1 in any empty cell, copy it and paste special on the problematic entries but as Value and Multiply.




That fixes it in one step for you.



7. Go To Special, Errors
How do you select Error cells in your report and maybe replace them with something more meaningful or delete them all at once?

Again, meet Go To Special.







8. Find and Replace Formula Parts
Find and Replace can work also on formula components. I often use it in making giant templates or in cleaning up my formulas after considerable report structure change.



9. Spelling Check and Auto Correct
Surprised? Well, Excel does have spell check and auto correct.



And those are the Data Cleaning tips we treated yesterday during the webinar.

Don't forget to forward this to friends and family members who will find this useful and love you more for it. And you should subscribe to our webinar directory to be in the loop of all future webinar announcements.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Training: Data Analysis and Business Intelligence Using Power BI

Data is the new crude oil. And business success in the 21st century is heavily reliant on the ability to mine and use relevant data about consumers, internal operations, financial operation and industry trend to drive business decisions.



UrBizEdge Limited, Nigeria’s leading business data analysis company is putting together this special training for proactive business professionals who already have some experience with business reporting and quantitative data analysis.
We will be focusing on Business Intelligence and how to create BI reports that leverage participant’s current data analysis skills using Microsoft’s Power BI. Power BI enables organizations to have a wholesome understanding of what is happening at all operational levels of the company.
This training is coming up on Friday 2nd December 2016 to Saturday 3rd December 2016. It covers our industry recognized certificate, practice materials, required software, tea break + lunch and other training materials.

The training will be facilitated by an officially awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). And we have had participants of our training from Promasidor, Citi Bank, Dalberg, SaveTheChildren, Mobil, Total, Vodacom, Nestle, Guinness Nigeria, Nigerian Breweries, Delta Afrik, LATC Marine, Broll, Habanera (JTI), SABMiller, IBM, Airtel, Diamond Bank, ECOWAS, Ministry of Finance, Palladium Group, Nokia Siemens Networks and DDB.

To register reach Michael on 08089382423 and mike@urbizedge.com or Hannah on 08021180874 and hannah@urbizedge.com to register. There is a class size limit.
Date: Friday 2nd December 2016 to Saturday 3rd December 2016
Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm each day
Venue: Kristina Jade Learning Center, 70b Olorunlogbon street, Off Alade Lawal street, Anthony Village, Lagos. 
Cost: N100,000/participant

The training will cover: 
1.       Power BI’s strength and weakness compared to the other popular BI tools
2.       Important concepts of Power BI
3.       Connecting to any type of data source (from structured to unstructured which will require some transforming)
4.       Getting data from existing services, organizational content pack, flat files and live databases
5.       Data Transformation (very broad and requires some knowledge of data analysis) and we will use DAX formulas too
6.       Creating relationships between the datasets and leveraging hierarchy (a.k.a. data modelling)
7.       Creating Reports
8.       Visualizations and the science behind choosing the right visuals
9.       Importing custom visuals (especially word cloud for sentiment analysis and other very useful non-native visuals)
10.   Creating dashboards
11.   Publishing Reports from the Power BI Desktop and pinning to dashboards
12.   Scheduling refresh
13.   Q & A Natural Language query
14.   Integrating with Cortana
15.   Live Dashboards
16.   Collaboration and sharing
17.   Printing the dashboard
18.   Analyzing the dashboard data (report) from Power BI service in Excel (new feature)
19.   Value Proposition to corporate customers
20.   Use case scenarios for entire company or business unit or departments
21.   Access from mobile app and setting data alerts (automated notifications when something of note happens)
22.   Lots of interaction (Q&A) and practice

 
Reach Michael on 08089382423 and mike@urbizedge.com or Hannah on 08021180874 and hannah@urbizedge.com to register. There is a class size limit.


You can also sign up for our highly educative tutorial newsletters at http://blog.urbizedge.com/ and read/download our Data Analysis Industry Report for 2016 for your company use.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Whitepaper: Data Analysis Industry Report 2016 - Nigeria

We are finally done with the whitepaper on the Data Analysis Industry in Nigeria for 2016.

You can download it here: Data Analysis Industry Report 2016 - Nigeria


Data Analysis Industry Report 2016 - Nigeria from Michael Olafusi

If you know someone who might benefit from the report, please do forward/share.

Also send me us your feedback or what you'll like covered in the 2017 edition.