Learning objectives - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

line:15% <v ->As data analyst,</v> line:15% chances are you spent or will spend line:15% a lot of time wrangling data, line:15% that comes in many shapes and sizes, and from a multitude of disparate sources. In most organizations, data is scattered and is sometimes not managed properly, which complicates the process of preparing data for analytics. Data preparation is often a data analyst's least favorite task. It is estimated that 70% of the work in any analytic endeavor is spent getting your data report ready. The task of consuming and transforming data in Excel, has long been one of the hardest yet most important skills for data analysts to master, as they prepare data sets for consumption and presentation. This usually involves removing rows and columns, cleaning erroneous column values, enhancing data sets with new columns, and merging opinion the Datasets. For years, Excel professionals have relied upon their mastery of advanced Excel functions, such as V lookup, if, find, clean and substitute on top of traditional data import means. But recently Microsoft has been working to modernize and up the end-to-end analytics experience inside of Excel. In this lesson, we will explore the capabilities of getting transformed data. This functionality is often seen as a game-changer for those that have used Excel for a long time. However, it does not mean that legacy cleaning methods go away. Some of the key features of getting transformed data are the following. And as many data connectors available and more are being added periodically, you will see that the data gathering and shaping capabilities are fast, easy, and intuitive to use. And one of my favorite things are that the transmissions have recorded, which allows you to repeat the steps to save manual and repetitive work. Plus there's some excellent documentation features that we will cover. So what does this all add up to? And it is often estimated that optimizing the repetitive activities around collecting, combining and transforming data using power query Excel will cut your data preparation time by up to 80%. In this lesson, we will cover the following. We'll use getting transformed data, we'll load data from various sources such as an Excel spreadsheet and from a website, we'll understand the data source settings, and we'll use the power creator to transform and cleanse data. Plus we'll learn how to better manage getting transformed data. Let's begin.