What is Zoho DataPrep? | Self Service Data Preparation

What is Zoho DataPrep? | Self Service Data Preparation

The productivity provider SaaS provided Zoho entered the business intelligence platform field in July 2021. Zoho announced an AI-powered data preparation, business intelligence, and self-service platform application that combined the new Zoho DataPrep application with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics.

This was to win over business users with a combination of features that focused on ease of use, supporting the data preparation, and the ability to blend internal data with the outside data sources. Zoho DataPrep application is self-service data preparation and management tool that uses machine learning to help business users integrate, transform, enrich, transform, and catalog data for creating and managing data pipelines.

Zoho has also added an integrated enterprise portal builder called Zoho Sites and presentation software called Zoho Show to the platform. This is for helping business users put their ideas into context. Basically, Zoho aspires to reduce any friction by empowering business users to drive decisions with data and without learning any new tools.

In this blog, we will learn about Zoho DataPrep in complete detail. So let’s begin.

What is Zoho DataPrep?
 
Zoho DataPrep is data cleaning software that enables organizations to prepare high-quality data by automatically looking for errors, discovering data patterns, cleaning, transforming, and enriching data. This is without any need for coding. It also helps in setting up data pipelines for syncing prepared data to Zoho Analytics or to any data warehouses.

Using Zoho DataPrep you can connect, cleanse, transform, enrich, schedule, and export data with ease. In addition, you can also catalog and manage how the prepared data is consumed with fine-grained controls. It is also possible to import data into Zoho DataPrep from over 50+ data sources such as files, FTP, feeds, cloud storage, databases, and data warehouses while making it simple to bring the data together.

The functions of Zoho DataPrep are:

1. Cleansing and Improving Data Quality
Zoho DataPrep helps in automatically profiling data for viewing distribution, outliers, statistics, and data quality. You can clean and improve data quality by removing duplicates, fixing invalid data, and missing values.

2. Transforming Data
Using the AI-powered data preparations and intelligent suggestions, one can apply over 250 transforms and prepare the data. You can learn to take advantage of machine learning to enrich data with sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, language detection, and much more.

3. Data Lineage
You can track every change applied to the data using ruleset. It is also possible to modify, disable, and remove any changes at any point in time. You can reuse rulesets for applying the same set of changes in other datasets while removing automated data preparation.

4. Data Catalog
The Zoho DataPrep can be used to catalog and manage datasets by categories, data quality, custom tags, data readiness, and much more. You can perform a system-wide metadata search powered by Zia for improving discoverability.

5. End to end data Pipelines
The organizations continue to gather data each day and cleaning it is never a one-time task. It includes setting up pipelines by automating imports, preparing data using rule sets, and exporting to destinations. This status can be monitored and one can also get notified in case there are any changes to improve the data quality.

Basically, you should use Zoho DataPrep because it helps in doing the below-mentioned things.
  1. Empowers business users with a self-service data preparation
  2. Offers high-quality data for any business need
  3. Helps in identifying the next step with augmented data preparation
  4. Brings unstructured data into the fold
  5. Helps in being expansive scale with the cloud
  6. It is an extensible data preparation platform with powerful APIs.
Zoho DataPrep is multipurpose software by design. It can fit in wherever it is needed. It helps in:

1. Advanced Analytics
The high data quality helps the data analyst to get deeper insights from business intelligence and analytics tools. The use of Zoho DataPrep reduces the time and effort needed to prepare the data.

Basically, data analytics enables organizations to interpret and analyze the data and make data-driven decisions. The data analysts can clean and prepare inconsistent and invalid data before coming on to analysis and insights.

The data analysts and scientists spend around 80% time preparing data and the use of Zoho DataPrep helps in speeding up the process and improving the data preparation experience.

2. Data Warehousing
You can run automated data pipelines from various sources to Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure SQL, and other popular cloud data warehouses.

It is also possible to build resilient and end-to-end data pipelines while connecting multiple siloed data sources to the data warehouse of an organization. This can be done with easy to maintain and low-code platform.                      

3. Machine Learning
The overall efficiency of the machine learning model is dependent on the quality of the data used for training it. The use of Zoho DataPrep helps the data scientists with data cleaning at a full scale without any need for coding.

Zoho DataPrep can be used to perform data collection, cleaning and pre-processing, feature engineering, and data labeling with the Zoho DataPrep.

4. Business Processes/Migration
You can migrate data between business apps using the DataPrep. It can be used for cleaning and enriching the data in business applications such as CRM, help desk, and survey tools for weeding out any duplicates and validating records.

Hence, the Zoho DataPrep can be used for enhancing the data quality, improving data flows, inefficiencies, and removing any redundancies across an organization.

Now that we have had a look at Zoho DataPrep in complete detail, let us now have a look at the features of Zoho DataPrep in complete detail. This will help in understanding what Zoho DataPrep can do for us.

1. Connecting to Multiple Sources
You can eliminate data silos in an organization, connect to it and a variety of other sources including feeds, files, cloud storage, warehouses, databases, and business applications.
  1. Import Files: It is possible to import files from anywhere in a wide range of formats including CSV, XLS, TSV, TXT, XML, XLSX, HTML, JSON from local storage, URLs, FTP servers, or from cloud drives such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box
  2. Warehouses and Databases: It is also possible to import data from a wide range of warehouses and databases.
  3. Tight Integration: Zoho DataPrep allows in connecting and cleansing data directly from Zoho Analytics using the built-in connectors.
2. Improving Data Quality
With Zoho DataPrep, you don’t ever have to miss out on important data with an intelligent solution.
  1. Data Quality: Zoho DataPrep helps in viewing valid, invalid, and missing data from each column using the data quality bar. You can filter and cleanse data using intelligent suggestions while improving the data quality and removing duplicate and invalid data.
  2. Smart Modelling: You can automatically find data types, create custom data types to find and fix invalid data, and get suggestions for joining the datasets.
  3. Data Distribution: Zoho DataPrep helps in understanding your data better with the help of multiple widgets like value distribution histogram, outliers, text patterns, value statistics, and more.
3. Transform and Enrich Data
Using the interactive data preparation studio, the data can be transformed without any code.
  1. Smart Selection: You can highlight the required part from the data and DataPrep helps in looking for selection patterns to offer accurate suggestions for extracting, counting, replacing, and splitting data.
  2. Transforming: It is possible to format and change the data using more than 250 transformations without the need for any coding. The data can be reshaped using pivot, unpivot, and summary transforms.
  3. Blend Data: The data can be blended from a wide range of sources using the join and append transforms.
  4. AI-Powered Enrichment: The data can be enriched with AI-powered transforms such as keyword extraction, language detection, sentiment analysis, and much more.
4. Automating Workflows
The automation of mundane tasks is one of the quickest ways to reduce time in preparing data. With the use of Zoho DataPrep, it is possible to schedule the data preparation workflows and receive alerts as well.
  1. End-to-end Data Pipelines: You can set up end-to-end data pipelines by connecting data from multiple sources, blending and cleaning data, and syncing to various destinations.
  2. Monitoring Data Quality: The use of Zoho DataPrep helps in continuous monitoring of data quality while sending alerts anytime the quality drops.
  3. Tracking and Reusing: The rulesets can be used to track any changes made to the data and reusing them across datasets.
5. Catalog Data
The built-in management capabilities help in classifying, cataloging, and governing data using the Zoho DataPrep.
  1. Discover Data Easily: The data can be discovered easily using a system-wide search capability powered by Zia.
  2. Mark as Ready: When the data is all prepared and set, it can be marked as ready for letting your team know that the data is available for sharing and exporting.
  3. Data About Data: More metadata can be added to the datasets and workspaces using the tags and improving searchability and filtering. All the important details about the datasets and workspaces can be found in a single overview pane.
6. Safe Data Sharing
You can collaborate seamlessly with the teams and offer fine-grained permissions for ensuring that the users access the data intended for them.
  1. Setting Access Permissions: You can set access permissions for sharing data, share workspaces with users and groups in an organization, and set role-based access controls to share data securely.
  2. Data Audit: You can get a detailed report of changes made to your data. The datasets when shared and exported can be tracked and exported. In addition, you can also verify if the security measures are applied to protect personal data before sharing or exporting the datasets.
7. Security and Compliance
The Zoho DataPrep enables you to find personal data in your dataset, ensure privacy by masking or tokenizing sensitive data, and also enables to adhere to privacy policy and data protection regulations such as GDPR.

All the data associated with the Zoho DataPrep is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Zoho DataPrep In Sum

An important part of any business analytics tool starts with preparing the data for insights. Zoho’s DataPrep is an AI powered data preparation platform that takes out a lot of manual work for correcting formatting, updating fields, and determining missing values. This enables the clients to set up once and save time without being dependent on difficult processes and inaccurate spreadsheets.

The Zoho DataPrep platform is on its way to becoming AI-driven data analytics and self-service tool through data preparation and augmented analytics. It is a BI platform that will allow its customers to clean, unify, and analyze cross-departmental data and obtain an encyclopedic view of the company.

This is a solution that combines Zoho DataPrep which automates and simplifies challenges of importing data sources along with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics 5.0. The users launch queries for a deeper understanding of data by using the graphical tools or using Ask Zia which is Zoho’s conversational AI platform. The end goal is to make things simple for end-users so that they can construct and share analytics featuring pre-built visual dashboards for data integration and flexible deployment.

Conclusion
Zoho DataPrep is advanced self-service data preparation and pipeline service that helps organizations prepare and manage huge volumes of data. In case you wish to implement Zoho DataPrep then get in touch with a qualified and certified Zoho partner who can guide you at each step.

I hope that you learned something new 
Cheers!
Abhi
(Seasoned Zoho Authorized and Certified Partner)

Feel free to contact me if you have any queries
Email: abhishek(@)encaptechno(dot)com
Call: +1-416-405-8185

    Zoho Desk Resources

    • Desk Community Learning Series


    • Digest


    • Functions


    • Meetups


    • Kbase


    • Resources


    • Glossary


    • Desk Marketplace


    • MVP Corner


    • Word of the Day


      Zoho CRM Plus Resources

        Zoho Books Resources


          Zoho Subscriptions Resources

            Zoho Projects Resources


              Zoho Sprints Resources


                Zoho Orchestly Resources


                  Zoho Creator Resources


                    Zoho WorkDrive Resources



                      Zoho Campaigns Resources

                        Zoho CRM Resources

                        • CRM Community Learning Series

                          CRM Community Learning Series


                        • Tips

                          Tips

                        • Functions

                          Functions

                        • Meetups

                          Meetups

                        • Kbase

                          Kbase

                        • Resources

                          Resources

                        • Digest

                          Digest

                        • CRM Marketplace

                          CRM Marketplace

                        • MVP Corner

                          MVP Corner




                          Zoho Writer Writer

                          Get Started. Write Away!

                          Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                            Zoho CRM コンテンツ






                              ご検討中の方

                                • Recent Topics

                                • Introducing automation and utility conversations in WhatsApp marketing

                                  We’re excited to announce the addition of two new features to our WhatsApp integration: Automation and Utility conversations. These enhancements will allow you to streamline your marketing efforts and engage with your customers more effectively by automating
                                • Extracting data from cells in zoho sheets for zoho books

                                  I am currently uploading my bank statment in excel format to zoho workdrive. I would like flow to extract certain data and send it to zoho books. Would scripting in zoho flow be able to help me with this? By this I mean should I attempt this in zoho flow
                                • Within the Basic KPI component in Analytics, it is impossible to set "next" day range as a filter

                                  Hi there, I am currently setting up a deal dashboard for the Sales team. While it is possible to filter deal records to show records that were created LAST X days only, it looks like a NEXT X days Closing date filter is not available. Would it be possible
                                • Pulling Specific Products from Sales Orders in Books to a CRM Record

                                  We currently process orders directly through our website (woocommerce) as well as through manual sales orders in zoho books. When an order comes through the website, all of the individual products from that order show up in the CRM record of that customer.
                                • Você já viu os cursos do Zoho Mind?

                                  Pessoal, Tem uma plataforma da Zoho chamada Zoho Mind, muito interessante os cursos e vídeos tutoriais que lá possui. Para a turma do Zoho Creator, tem uma dica de Buscar dados em Formulário, segue o link e clique em Zoho Creator. https://www.zohomind.com.br/#/videostutoriais
                                • Como gerar gatilhos para pagamento de impostos no Zoho Books?

                                  Olá Pessoal, boa tarde! Gostaria de saber como vocês estão escriturando os impostos a pagar no Zoho Books. Vi que temos a opção de Bills, porém se eu escriturar nesta aba do Zoho Books para gerar lembretes de tempo de vencimento por exemplo vai refletir
                                • Subform Time field to string.

                                  Good afternoon All. I have a Subform 'Delivery_Receiving_Hours' that captures Day (Dropdown), Time_Open (Time), and Time_Close (Time). I need to capture this data and send it to a multiline field in the CRM. The code, posted below, below will capture
                                • workflow for bounced email gets triggered, but email is status = opened

                                  Hello, I have a workflow that sends me an email if outgoing email are bounced. Now I got some kind of this emails, but the corrosponding contacts have status = open at the email. Why this bounce-workflow is triggered? Reports > Email Reports > Bounce
                                • Data export

                                  I need to export our customer's data and projects' data for our purpose but am unable to export full data i only get around 3160 projects and around 2k customer can you please help me to get full data, please
                                • Adjusting Physical Inventory

                                  Not getting very far with support on this one, they say they are going to fix it but nothings happened since November. Please give this a thumbs up if you would like to see this feature or comment if you have some insight. Use Case: Inventory set to be
                                • Zoho Marketing Plus : Un outil tout-en-un pour la création de pages, la collaboration et la gestion du calendrier marketing

                                  Nous sommes ravis de vous présenter trois nouvelles fonctionnalités puissantes de Zoho Marketing Plus s’enrichit désormais d’un page web (l'éditeur de pages), qui vous permet de créer des pages attrayantes et à fort taux de conversion pour vos campagnes
                                • Grouping payments to match deposits

                                  Is there a way to group multiple invoice payments together so they match credit card batches and grouped deposits in the bank account? Basically, we are creating invoices for each of our transactions, and applying a payment to each of the invoices. Our payments are either credit cards or checks. We want to be able to group payments together so when our bank account reflects a credit card batch made up of many transactions, or the deposit we took to the bank that has multiple checks from different
                                • Employees can not add some expenses suddenly

                                  Zoho expense was working fine and whenever there was a new merchant, it would automatically add and also the same auto added in Zoho Books (due to merchant-vendor sync) untill now. From today, it is having problems in searching the existing vendors and
                                • Zoho email setup in office365

                                  When i am trying to setup zoho mail setup using my domain in office365 and it is not working and it says that we couldn't log on to the incoming (IMAP) server and please check your email address and password and try again. I was able to login using my
                                • iOS 10: Caller ID new feature?

                                  Hi, in the update history of the iOS App (for iOS10) - v.3.2 - i found the point "caller identification" has this feature been deactivated again? i cannot find anything on my iphone on how to activate this feature. or does it just work from the beginning?
                                • Recommendations to store meeting notes for easy access from Contacts, Accounts & Deals module records?

                                  I would like your advice on how to achieve this use case for my organization. It’s related to where/how best to store meeting notes from a conversation with Contact(s) working at an Account (Company) in the context of a Deal. The ideal solution (from
                                • Bank reconciliation. Match Transaction -filter

                                  When matching an imported bank statement file we only get a match if it is an excact match on both amount and date. Then a suggestions comes up with a very broad selection regarding amount, and no default "between" dates. I can then go an manually adjust the filter, and have to put in from-to amounts and dates. How do I set a default from-to date?  As an example, I would like the date to be +- 3 days, Thanks.
                                • Added new staff but does not appear in other organization list

                                  Hi, I added the new staff under Sales Manager in the contacts, but it does not appear in the other organization list where I need to create a contact, and I can't select the newly added Sales Manager
                                • Integrating Calendly with Zoho Calendar in Zoho Mail

                                  I moved my office into a business incubator space that uses Calendly for meeting management and events. Calendly doesn't have a integration with Zoho Calendar and vice versa. I was directed to Zapier for integration but it doesn't have an integration
                                • Map fields from module X to a lookup field in subform in module Y

                                  Hi there In the 1st screenshot attached, you can see a subform in myLeads module. You can see that there is a number already filled there - that is the 'Property ID' and it is a single line field. It is the 'Property ID' of an entry I have in another
                                • 🎄 Jingle, Mingle, and Automate: Spread Christmas Cheer with Zoho Desk Auto-Replies! 🎄

                                  Hello Everyone! Welcome to this week's episode of the Community Learning Series. Christmas is in the air, and I’m sure we can all feel the jingle and the mingle of the season! The folks at Zylker Techfix are no exception—they’re busy with holiday plans
                                • how to create a new line in string in Client Script?

                                  I want to show an alert using client script, I need to add a new line in String, I assume I can use \n\n inside a string, but unfortunately it doesnt work ZDK.Client.showAlert("First Line \n\nI expect this is in second line");
                                • Surely it's time Inline editing from views

                                  I think the first request I found for in-line editing from grids was approximately 12 years ago - that post was locked because it was suggested Zoho sheetview solved the problem. However, it's now 2024, and in-line editing from grids is just a basic expectation.
                                • Multi branding issue with sender addresses

                                  Hello, I'm currently working on a project involving two (seperate) brands. Named 'Windeck' and 'Prolance'. They've chosen CRM Plus and I'm currently working on CRM, SalesIQ, Social and Marketing Automation. So far, I'm able to make enough separations
                                • How to Replace an Assessment in a Job Opening on Zoho Recruit

                                  Hi everyone, I’m currently using Zoho Recruit and would like to replace the assessment linked to a specific job opening. I want to remove the existing assessment and add a new one. What is the best way to do this without losing any important data or affecting
                                • Is there API Doc for Zoho Survey?

                                  Hi everyone, Is there API doc for Zoho Survey? Currently evaluating a solution - use case to automate survey administration especially for internal use. But after a brief search, I couldn't find API doc for this. So I thought I should ask here. Than
                                • Email Campaigns overview page is missing SENT DATE and # people sent to!

                                  I would like to see the date the email campaign was sent, so I can understand and track when each email campaign was sent. Right now, unless you go to a contact who received a campaign, you cannot see when the campaign was sent (!!!!!!). So, if my boss
                                • SEO recommendation of H1 tag for website tittle

                                  The exact words are “ It is good practice to place the page title inside the H1tag.” Now I already have one H1 tag on my website but it is not website tittle. In the SEO recommendation that is clear too that I have h1 tag on my page. Now I don’t know
                                • How to choose other payment methodes than creditcards

                                  We have connected stripe as a payment provider in zoho books, booking, commerce and checkout. In stripe we selected al major payment methodes for Belgium (mainly bancontact). However, at checkout customers seems to have only the possibility to pay with
                                • Introducing Zia LLM: Zoho’s in-house Generative AI solution for CRM's AI capabilities

                                  Hello everyone, We're excited to announce the launch of our in-house Large Language Model (LLM) by Zia to power our AI offerings. What is LLM? LLM stands for Large Language Model, a powerful AI technology that processes and generates human-like text based
                                • How to call a Creator function which is in a different Creator application?

                                  How to call a Creator function which is in a different Creator application?
                                • Can the code in my "Successful form submission" WF be invoked from a function?

                                  Can "Successful form submission" be invoked from a function? Data gets into a form manually and programatically. My code in "successful form submission" is good and I want to reuse it/call it, from another function which does Insert Into How to achieve
                                • Kaizen #169 - Serialization and Schema Management in Queries

                                  Hello everyone! Welcome back to another post in the Kaizen series! In Kaizen #166, we discussed handling Variables in Queries and associating the query in Kiosk. This week, we will discuss Serialization and Schema management in Queries. Business Scenario
                                • Introducing Keyboard Shortcuts for Zoho CRM

                                  Dear Customers, We're happy to introduce keyboard shortcuts for Zoho CRM features! Until now, you might have been navigating to modules manually using the mouse, and at times, it could be tedious, especially when you had to search for specific modules
                                • Feature Request: Notebooks within notebooks (Tree-like structure)

                                  Dear Zoho! I already migrated all my stuff from Google Keep, Im really fond of Zoho Notebook so far. One thing that could make the service much more powerful is multi-level notebooks (or tree like structure). For example, entering into Notebook named
                                • Can't get authorization for Sandbox environment using the self client

                                  Hello, After creating a self client, and following the client-credentials method (as it's not optimat to manually generate a code for every 10 minutes), after inputting the sandbox org id for SOID parameter, im getting the error: "error": "no_org". For
                                • Create landing pages from Zoho Marketing Plus

                                  Hey everyone, Over the last few months, we've introduced various features and enhancements to bolster the marketing capabilities of Zoho Marketing Plus and make it simpler for everyone. To that end, we're excited to announce that Zoho LandingPage is now
                                • Custom service report or Zoho forms integration

                                  Hello, So far the experience with Zoho FSM and the integration with Books has been good, however there are limitations with service reports. As with my business, many organisations send technicians to different types of jobs that call for a different
                                • Email tracking subdomain

                                  The Email Tracking configuration screen of the ZeptoMail asks for a subdomain. I have gone through the documentation but could not find more information about how that subdomain is used by ZeptoMail to track the emails. Can someone throw some light about
                                • Chart View group X-axis values above a value

                                  I have a data set with X values ranging from 0 up to 300-400, the Y values are an AVG of the values for the given X. I am interested in the values at the low end of the scale, say 0-10 and want the X values 10 and greater to be grouped into a single category
                                • Next Page