Microsoft Excel 2010 – Text functions to Automate Data Cleansing

As a data analyst, I deal with a lot of data.  Most of my time dealing with data is spent doing data cleansing.  Data cleansing involves taking the text you are given and converting it into a more usable form.  There are several Excel functions that will automate the data cleansing process.  Knowing these functions can save you hundreds of hours of time in your data cleansing.

Excel – Count text values

It is easy to sum or count a group of numbers in Excel. What is harder is summing or counting a group of words. For example, let’s say you have a column of data that contains “Yes” and “No” and you want to count the number of “No’s”