10 WAYS DATA PREPARATION CAN HELP EXCEL

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1 10 WAYS DATA PREPARATION CAN HELP EXCEL OVERVIEW Up to 80% of all time spent on analytics is consumed by preparing data. Data is never perfect and most of the time you need to clean, enrich and join multiple data sets to gain meaningful insight. Many analysts turn to Excel to perform these data preparation functions which can take hours or even days. Datawatch Monarch, the industry standard self-service data preparation solution allows analysts to manipulate, filter, enrich, blend and combine disparate data sets in a matter of minutes. When you re done, you can bring it back into Excel or directly into the native formats for IBM Watson Analytics or Cognos Analytics, Tableau, Qlik or other visualization applications.

2 1 UNDERSTAND YOUR DATA Monarch helps you understand your data and determine what data needs attention. Previewing a data table is a very manual process. You must have multiple spreadsheets open to see which table has the right data. You also need to create complex macros to hide multiple datasheets. You quickly understand your data and see data tables before loading. You can determine the quality of your data and what needs to be cleaned.

3 2 EXTRACT DATA IN REPORTS AND PDFS Monarch enables you to access and prepare data trapped within any report, text file or PDF. The manual process of copying charts and data from within PDFs into Excel can take hours. Data brought over into one cell has to be manually parsed into different columns. Each table in the PDF needs to be manually copied and reformatted. In one click, you can automatically parse the document into rows and columns. All of your tables are brought into a standard table format for further data preparation. Even multi-line reports are intelligently captured into neat rows and columns.

4 3 USE DATA FROM WEBSITES Monarch helps you bring in data from websites and automatically remove the noise. WWW When trying to copy data from a website, the layout of the data does not transfer cleanly resulting in messy hyperlinks and missing information. Hours of formatting is needed to fix the charts in order to merge them with other data sets. You can parse the website data, stripping out all the noise like ads and graphics and simply bring the selected data into rows and columns.

5 4 COMBINE DATA SETS Monarch helps you combine multiple data sets into one with ease. VLOOKUPs and manual copy/pasting is required to join multiple spreadsheets. You need to select entire columns and rows in multiple data sets. You can easily join entire data sets or certain columns with the click of a button. You can choose from a wide variety of different joins. Monarch s intelligent design explains the 4 different types of joins you can select from.

6 5 FIX MISSING DATA Monarch helps you identify missing data and then fill in that missing data with the correct information. You search for nulls and then replace them with one value. You have to manually change values of each row and column in the entire data set. You can simply select the ditto function to fill down the blanks in the entire data set. You can replace or remove data or nulls with the click of a button.

7 6 MASK SENSITIVE DATA Monarch has the ability to mask data so you make sure you comply with corporate or regulatory standards. You have to create complex macros in order to hide sensitive data. The data is never actually removed from the spreadsheet, it s just hidden which is an IT security issue. You can securely mask sensitive data like social security numbers or account IDs. The data can be fully redacted or you can create consistent aliases so you can still aggregate information like customer transactions or patient information. Different roles can see only the data they are authorized to see.

8 7 CONSOLIDATING DATA TABLES Monarch can bring together multiple data sets with similar row structure with ease. When you have multiple data sets with similar data and need to combine the rows together there is a lot of manual copy and pasting. You simply combine the similar data sets by selecting the two tables and hitting append. Similar data sets will be recognized and automatically combined when new data is present.

9 8 HISTORY OF YOUR WORK Monarch allows you to see who made specific changes to reports. When sharing files, you can t see the steps taken to clean the data. To make any changes, you must change or update all prior work. You can see every step taken with the data. You can go back and make edits without redoing the entire process. Users can collaborate within the file by seeing each other s work.

10 9 RECONCILIATION OF REPORTS Monarch can assist you with reconciling reports and seeing a summary of changes. Significant changes are difficult to see in large data filled reports. You have to set up rules to color thresholds and keep updating these rules as the data changes. You will have a full summary of the reports that shows what has changed in the data. Reports are automatically updated as new data is added.

11 10 AUTOMATE YOUR DATA PREP Monarch automates data preparation so that as the data updates so will the new prepared data set or report. When the data is new, you have to manually redo all of the data preparation steps. You have to create complex macros in order for reports to change on the fly. Every step of the data preparation process is automatically captured so it can be reused and automated. You can run this on a predetermined schedule or you can have it automatically run when new data becomes available. ABOUT DATAWATCH Datawatch Corporation (NASDAQ-CM: DWCH) enables ordinary users to deliver extraordinary results with all their data. Only Datawatch can unlock data from the widest variety of sources and prepare it for use with visualization tools or other business processes. When real-time visibility to rapidly changing data is critical, Datawatch enables you to visualize streaming data for the most demanding business environments such as capital markets. Organizations of every size worldwide use Datawatch products including 93 of the Fortune 100. Datawatch is headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts with offices in New York, London, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Singapore, and Manila, and with partners and customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. See how Datawatch can help you by downloading a free version at Datawatch Corporation 4 Crosby Drive Bedford, MA twitter.com/datawatch 2016 Datawatch Corporation. All rights reserved. Datawatch and Datawatch Monarch are trademarks of Datawatch Corporation. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are properties of their respective owners.