From the course: Excel: Managing and Analyzing Data

Deciding if your data is ready for use - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel: Managing and Analyzing Data

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Deciding if your data is ready for use

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- [Instructor] Now that you've checked your data, possibly done some data cleansing, there's one question, is your data ready to be used? Can you trust it? To answer that, you have to be clear. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to get payroll calculated? Are there inventory issues? Are there orders that you have downloaded from the backend of the website and had to investigate and see if it's ready? That helps you to determine what you need to have and if you have it, and if it's in a format that you need. And then you have to really ask yourself, "What is at stake?" If the data's corrupt, are you looking at maybe mild embarrassment, or might you send termination warning letters out to the wrong people? Very different stakes there. If you send happy new year postcards out and somebody gets four and a bunch of people get none, that's low stakes. It'd be embarrassing, but nobody is going to get scared and start hollering and calling HR to say, "Wait a minute. why am I getting this letter?" And then you say, oh yeah, something was corrupt in the data. No, you shouldn't have gotten that letter. Now there's a problem. Those are high stakes. And that's how you ask yourself, "Is this data clean enough for what I have to do. Based on the stakes and your goals, you decide if the data is clean enough.

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