Imagine for a moment that you have already detected the origin of your problems and now you want to know how to treat your data.
In this entry we will show you what criteria do you have at your disposal to minimize errors and improve your data, resulting in a homogenous, reliable and monetizable database.
Criteria for data treatment
The first thing you have to make clear is what do you want to achieve with your databases.
Once you have started from your initial data and knowing the goal you want to reach, you must apply the treatment criteria that better adapts to your needs.
The criteria you may apply to improve your data can be centered on:
- Cleaning and formatting.
- Validating.
- Get more information.
- Delete Duplicates.
It is not necessary that you apply all these criteria. You may only use those that allow you to reach your goals in future actions.

Cleaning is a heavy duty, but it is indeed necessary to get the maximum quality of your data
Do I need to clean and give format to my data?
Let’s suppose that you have an e-mail and you have detected some of the following errors regarding formatting:
- It lacks an @.
Example: user#domain.com - The domain following the @ does not have a separating point.
Example: user@domaincom - There are characters that are not allowed.
Example: my user@gmail.com
All the aforementioned problems are related to data formatting.
If you delete all characters not allowed, taking into account the data type about to be treated (telephone, email, URL,..), then you will clean the data to give it a format according to its type. This process is called
This process does not guarantee the data validity, though it helps you to treat your data to confirm that it is visually correct and in this way we will prevent saving a value with a non-valid format.

A kid with a noise problem on his data
What will we see next?
We have started to explain what criteria do you need to apply when treating data. Besides, you already know what does it mean to Purge your data in order to comply with a format.
In the next entry, we will explain what validation criteria allows you to improve your bases and get the maximum benefit for your actions.
Best,
uProc team