Data Preparation: Sourcing, Manipulation, and Integration
Michael Rees · 2023
This chapter covers topics that relate to the preparation of data that may be required prior to being able to analyze it. It discusses data-related issues that should be considered when one is first engaging in a modeling process. The chapter presents an overview of the stages in the general data preparation and analysis processes. It describes the cleaning and manipulation of data sets that are already in native Excel and shows how to integrate Excel data sets into a single structure or “flat table” in Excel. The chapter also introduces PowerQuery and PowerPivot (the Excel Data Model), which have functionality that is potentially important for those needing to build models which use significant amounts of data or require manipulation before it can be analyzed.