Module: 5- Assignment
1. Kindly search for excel functions/formulas/techniques/methods that would be useful
for cleaning data and provide at least five. Explain how to apply these.

Unpivot Data- You can use Power Query to extract data from any source, clean and alter
it, and then load it into another Excel sheet, Power Pivot, or the Power BI Designer canvas.
Unpivot Columns are one of the most useful features. This combines columns with
identical features (e.g., Jan, Feb, March...) into a single column or tabular format (e.g.,
Month), allowing you to perform additional analysis using Pivot Tables, which was
impossible before.

Find & Replace- You may quickly amend your data using the Find & Replace feature or
the CTRL+H shortcut. Consider the case where you have thousands of rows of data
downloaded from an external source with the incorrect date.

Convert numbers stored as text into numbers- Numbers are stored as text when data is
imported from text files or other databases. Additionally, some people use an apostrophe
(') before a number to make it text. If you use these cells in calculations, this could cause
major problems. Here's a foolproof method for converting these numbers from text to
numbers. Type 1 in any blank cell. Press Control + C to select the cell where you entered
1. Choose the cell or range you'd want to convert to numbers. (Keyboard Shortcut – Alt +
E + S) Select Paste –> Paste Special. Select Multiply in the Paste Special Dialogue box (in
operations category) and click OK to convert all numbers in text format back to numbers.

Remove Duplicates- There are two options when dealing with duplicate data: highlight it
or delete it.
Highlight Duplicate Data:
o Select the data and Go to Home –> Conditional Formatting –> Highlight Cells
Rules –> Duplicate Values.
o Specify the formatting and all the duplicate values get highlighted.
Delete Duplicates in Data:
 Select the data and Go to Data –> Remove Duplicates.
 If your data has headers, ensure that the checkbox at the top right is checked.
 Select the Column(s) from which you want to remove duplicates and click OK.

Remove non-printable characters- The CLEAN Formula- One of the most difficult
aspects of data cleansing is removing non-printable characters. Work is generally
complicated due to the use of text formulas. To get rid of non-printing characters, use the
CLEAN () technique.
2. Briefly explain the essence of the VLOOKUP Excel function.
VLOOKUP or Vertical Lookup is a function in excel that enables search for a certain value
in a column (the so-called table array), to return a value from a different column in the
same row. This tool looks for a piece of information in a table or data set and extracting
some corresponding data/information. A VLOOKUP can look up data automatically
instead of a person having to do it manually, which saves time and makes the works faster.