Data preparation, or data prep, was once a fairly simple operation. But as the volume of data and the number of data sources available to the enterprise have grown exponentially, data prep has become a complex, time-consuming and costly endeavor for IT teams.
Data prep involves taking raw data from multiple sources, cleaning it, validating it, structuring it and enriching it to prepare it for use in business analytics and business intelligence (BI) projects. In our opinion, this is the most important step in a BI project:
Clean, consolidated data in a robust data model enables frontend dashboards, visualisations, reports and self-service
Connect and combine data from hundreds of data sources – from apps and databases to cloud services and more. Qlik Sense enables you to unlock your silos of data and deliver the comprehensive views of your business to generate new insights and data-driven actions.
Databases – Simply get data from both your legacy and modern databases through Qlik connectivity. It’s built in.
Cloud Services – Know how your brand performs on social media or utilize data with your cloud services through Qlik’s pre-configured connectivity.
Enterprise Applications – Save time with out-of-the-box links to popular applications like SAP or build your own data connections.
Files – Let users discover data from shared folders and files such as Excel using Qlik connectivity. Just drag and drop.
Visual Data Preparation
Smart, self-service data preparation, enhanced by AI, allows your non-technical users to visually combine, transform, and load data from multiple sources — without leaving data behind.
Data sources can be easily combined using drag-and-drop functionality, with machine suggestions to help identify the best associations. Intelligent profiling automatically processes various data types and provides descriptive statistics. Visual transformation offers a full set of data prep features such as derived fields, binning, and concatenation.
Qlik Scripting
Need something more advanced? Qlik Sense has powerful scripting, which enables the control of the data load options and data transformations. It enables the use of many inbuilt functions available in Qlik and creates subroutines to be used across multiple scripts within a Qlik Sense application. You manipulate and prepare the data structure by using script statements.
Any questions? Please feel free to contact us!
Kind Regards,
The Insight Consulting Team