Data Cleansing Helps Speed Up Your ComputersSuppose you take a job as an accounts manager at a large business. Now, suppose that when you start looking over and looking into customer computer files at your new job, you find a jumble of incomplete, noncongruent information. Being the perfectionist you are, you'd like to line up all these customer files where they are all contain the same information in the same format. You're not a computer guru, but know there must be some way to "tidy up" the messy computer files without having to go through them all manually. What you're looking at is data cleansing. Data cleansing, according to Wikipedia, is the "act of detecting and correcting (or removing) corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set." During this process all outdated, redundant or improperly formatted information will be corrected. For instance, if you want all the phone numbers in your files to be in the format of 999-999-9999, data cleansing will detect all numbers in any other format and change them to the needed format. This also goes with birthdates. Since we've recently moved into a new century, some old files may still be in the format of a two-digit year instead of a four-digit year. Data cleansing will put all birthdates into the proper format and make data analysis a cinch. If, by chance, you are merging computer data systems, data cleansing can help with this job also. For example, let's say two doctor's offices combine and want to put all their files on one computer system. However, the patient profiles kept by each office are in different formats. Data cleansing can help merge and format all the patient profiles so you can access them without having a bad day at the office. In fact, this congruency of files is one of the main goals of data cleansing. Another goal of data cleansing is to detect and delete duplicate records. This is especially useful if one particular patient saw both doctors. Data cleansing will combine this patient's profiles into one file. While data cleansing was once a job done manually, there are now several sophisticated computer programs that can do this job for you. Actually, this computer assisted data cleansing is more reliable than that done by humans since humans can make errors while completing this process, negating the act of data cleansing. If you want the files saved on your computer to be correct as well as congruent, you might want to look into the options data cleansing software provides. Whether you want to tidy up existing files or merge two or more sets of files on your computer so all files will be congruent with one another, this software can help make this project much easier. It will also leave you with more reliable results. |