Data Wrangler with Lumira – for Cleaning and Transforming Data

Stanford’s Data Wrangler is a tool for cleaning and transforming data that isn’t in the familiar relational form.  There is a video on how to use it at Data Wrangler and I encourage you to try it.

First, I tried with the CSV as follows:

You can see the above file isn’t in an easy to read relational format.  There are empty rows, and you can’t easily get to the state field.

Using Data Wrangler, you can remove the empty rows and extract the state field:

Then you export it to a CSV file that Lumira Desktop can read.  For the first time ever when creating a geographic hierarchy in Lumira I have no unresolved values:

Then I create the storyboard:

Here is a treemap/heatmap, showing in the year 2008 the District of Columbia had the most reported property crimes:

So I encourage you to try Data Wrangler out – it is a free tool.  There are some data limitations in terms of number of columns you can copy in but it is great for cleaning and transforming the data.

Related:

Lumira sessions are at BI 2014

Jump Start ASUG Annual Conference SAPPHIRE with a Pre-Conference Session – Back and Better than Ever includes Lumira sessions