Using Visual Intelligence to Get the Right Data

[TammyPowlas]

In Timo Elliott’s blog from last year he says “information management’s pointless unless you have the right data in the first place.”  This is very true for a situation I experienced and to get past it, I used Visual Intelligence to spot data quality issues.

Scenario:

I had to work with a very large Excel file with 110 columns of data with thousands of rows.  This was an exported file from another system.  It was a file was saved in an old .XLS file so it had to be renamed to one with a .XLSX extension, so Visual Intelligence could read it.

I found it overwhelming to use simple Excel with all of the columns, and because there were other issues with the file I couldn’t even import it into Microsoft Access – I received file import issues.

So what did I do?  I tried it out with Visual Intelligence.  The first step was to select only the needed columns and not the 110 columns as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1

I unclicked the “Select All/None” and selected only the needed columns.

Next, there was a category in this system called “I don’t know” – so of course, before you report on something, you need to know what it is.  I was able to filter in Visual Intelligence on the “I don’t know” records and update them in the source system as shown below in Figure 2:

Figure 2

Next, in the column for “Role” I had records with blank values, and that needs investigating as well, so I filter on those records as shown in Figure 3 below:

Figure 3

Also, the country column included a variety of entries as shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4

Figure 4 shows 3 difference variations of the United States - U.S., U.S.A., United States of America.  What to do about the blank country?  It also looks like I have records with zip codes in them.  Is there a country called "Inida" - for sure they meant India.

This is just a handful of the issues I had to fix with the source data, which Visual Intelligence helped identify in quick manner as shown above.

For More Information:

If you are attending BI 2013 in Las Vegas next month, check out this Visual Intelligence session:

Self-service data discovery for business users and analysts using SAP Visual Intelligence

There is also an upcoming SCN Analytics webinar on Visual Intelligence on Wednesday, February 13^th and this is open to everyone.  Register here.  If you cannot make it live, I encourage you to register to be notified for when the recording and slides are available.

You can sign up to receive notifications for upcoming Analytic Webinars by clicking “Receive e-mail notifications”

ASUG has an upcoming webinar March 13th on What is New in Visual Intelligence / BusinessObjects Explorer 4.1

Also, Visual Intelligence will be covered at ASUG Annual Conference in May.