Paige Schaefer

“Excel running slow” is a common complaint for more and more users. Excel’s ubiquity and ease of use are its strengths, but Excel runs slow when tackling large data sets. We’ve said it before: the simple fact is that Excel’s framework for data processing wasn’t made for big data. It’s not just that Excel becomes...

To make data useful for collaborative study, modeling, and large-scale analytics, data standardization is a necessary process. Standardizing data—such as matching the terms “Ave vs. Avenue vs. Ave.” to “Ave.”—increases the speed at which data analysts can work. The need for data standardization has grown exponentially as data sources become more and more diverse, regardless...

Structured and unstructured data are both used extensively in data analysis but operate quite differently. Let’s take a closer look at these two data formats to understand just how different structured data and unstructured data are.  Structured data vs unstructured data Searchability is often used to differentiate between structured vs unstructured data. Structured data typically...

Most Excel users know their way around a pivot table. A pivot table can quickly summarize basic statistical information (with sums or averages, for example) and display that data in a more meaningful format.  But before you can start pivoting your data, you may need to rearrange your data —in other words, you need to...

Data is the lifeblood of contemporary businesses and is used to formulate marketing, sales and customer service strategies. It is at the core of every decision business leaders make to promote the growth and profitability of their organizations. Data empowers leaders to make precise decisions based on facts and trends rather than speculations. Excellent business...

Today, we announced the results of our first-ever survey on the state of data preparation, which includes responses from nearly 300 analysts and IT professionals. At a high-level, the results show that organizations are spending too much time preparing data, and this wasted time is hindering analytic progress. When we crunched the numbers, however, we...