Fiverr is an online marketplace where freelancers can offer services to clients around the world.
If you’re a MS Excel expert, you can offer your services to companies that might want to hire a freelancer with specialized skills. Often, these organizations are looking for someone who can:
Create customized templates
Review spreadsheets for errors
Clean data in Excel
In this article, we’ll outline the skills required to clean data in Excel.
What is Data Cleaning?
Data cleaning, also known as data cleansing or data scrubbing, is the process of identifying and correcting inaccuracies, inconsistencies, data errors, missing and duplicate values in an organization’s data.
After you import data, the goal of data cleaning is to ensure the quality and reliability of the data, so it can be used for data analysis and decision-making.
Data cleaning is a specialized skill that utilizes several key features in Microsoft Excel. If you become proficient in data cleaning, it can turn into a profitable side hustle on Fiverr.
Here are 8 techniques you’ll need to clean data in Excel.
1) Remove Duplicates
If a data set contains duplicate values, they’ll need to be removed before any data analysis can be done.
Excel can easily remove duplicates.
Click the Remove Duplicates button on the Data tab, in the Data Tools group. In the Remove Duplicates dialog box, select the columns to be parsed for duplicate values, indicate whether your list has headers or not, then click OK to remove duplicate data.
2) Text to Columns
Excel’s Convert Text to Columns wizard splits text from one cell into one or more columns.
Click the Text to Columns button on the Data tab, in the Data Tools group to launch the Convert Text to Columns Wizard. In this dialog box, indicate whether your data is delimited or fixed width, provide additional details as required, and let Excel work its magic!
3) Remove Formatting
Often, in order to format data consistently, you’ll need to remove any existing formatting from your source data. Excel’s clear button lets you do this quickly.
Click the Clear button in the Home > Editing group then select Clear Formats.
4) Spell Check
If you want clean data, you’ll need to correct misspelled words in columns that contain comments or descriptions. This is exactly what the Spelling button does in Review > Proofing.
5) Change Case (Capitalization)
Excel has several functions that let you adjust capitalization quickly.
The UPPER function converts text to uppercase
The LOWER function converts text to lowercase
The PROPER function capitalizes the first letter of each word
These functions are indispensable tools for anyone offering to clean data in Excel.
6) Trim Function
The TRIM function is used to remove all extra spaces from text, other than single spaces between words. Leading spaces, trailing spaces, or additional spaces between words are eliminated instantly.
This function is a powerful data cleaning technique. You can eliminate extra spaces from all the cells in a column in seconds!
7) Find and Replace
The find and replace feature is an invaluable part of the data cleaning process, whenever you need to substitute one word or phrase for another.
To use this tool, select all the columns you that you’d like to parse, click the Find & Select button in the Home > Editing group and select Replace from the drop-down menu (or press Ctrl + H).
8) Conditional Formatting
Conditional formatting lets you format cells based on their contents. While I wouldn’t say that conditional formatting is an essential way to clean data in Excel, it can make your data set easier to work with.
Using conditional formatting, you can easily identify duplicate values or highlight cells with common attributes.
Select the cells you want to configure, click the Conditional Formatting in the Home > Styles group and specify rules in the drop-down menu to apply a column data format of your choosing.
Are You Ready to Offer Data Cleaning in Excel as a Service on Fiverr?
When I searched for data cleaning on Fiverr, over 4,600 gigs came up. Data cleansing is obviously a very popular service for any organization that uses data analytics.
As expected, there are plenty of freelancers offering to clean a data set for $5 — the site is called Fiverr for a reason — but those basic gigs were often limited to a few hundred rows. Premium gigs for top rated sellers offering to clean data in Excel were priced at hundreds of dollars each.
With a working knowledge of the techniques described in this article, and a few decent clients, you could easily make an extra $1,000 per month… not a bad way for a part-time data analyst to cover a car payment and groceries!
Great Excel tips, thanks for sharing these