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 Campaigns Resources


        • Desk Community Learning Series


        • Digest


        • Functions


        • Meetups


        • Kbase


        • Resources


        • Glossary


        • Desk Marketplace


        • MVP Corner


        • Word of the Day


        • Ask the Experts


          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 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

                                  • Set Custom Icon for Custom Modules in new Zoho CRM UI

                                  • Live Webinar: Getting Started with Zoho WorkDrive - A Complete Overview

                                    Hello everyone, We’re excited to invite you to our upcoming live webinar! Discover how to set up your team, bring in your data, and make the most of WorkDrive’s collaboration, organization, AI, and security capabilities. This session is perfect for anyone

                                  • Marketing Tip #4: Build your email list early

                                    Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment. Don’t wait until later; start collecting subscribers now. When you've got their attention, you can send them emails about offers, new product launches, seasonal greetings, and more. Try this

                                  • Is anyone else having trouble saving a custom image in their email signature, or is it just me?

                                    When I try to save the image I get an error that says "Operation Failed" I opened a support ticket two weeks ago and received a response that it would be debugged, but it still isn’t working

                                  • Unify Overlapping Functionalities Across Zoho Products

                                    Hi Zoho One Team, We would like to raise a concern about the current overlap of core functionalities across various Zoho applications. While Zoho offers a rich suite of tools, many applications include similar or identical features—such as shift management,

                                  • Zoho Desk Domain mapping / Cloudflare CNAME not recognized

                                    Hello, my website is behind Cloudflare and SSL. From the Cloudflare control panel I added a CNAME record such as support.mydomain.com pointing to desk.cs.zohohost.com but I'm stuck with the message "Make sure you've mapped the CNAME entry..."

                                  • Power of Automation :: Quick way to associate your Projects with Zoho CRM

                                    A custom function is a software code that can be used to automate a process and this allows you to automate a notification, call a webhook, or perform logic immediately after a workflow rule is triggered. This feature helps to automate complex tasks and

                                  • Create an Eye-Catching Announcement Widget for Your Help Center

                                    Hello Everyone! In this week’s edition, let’s explore how to keep your customers updated with exciting news in the Help Center. See how ZylkerMobile wowed their customers by bringing updates right to their portal. ZylkerMobile, the renowned brand for

                                  • I want to add my other zoho account in same pc

                                    why does zoho restrict me doing many things as i also want to add my second mail account bit its not allowing me to do that

                                  • Search in Zoho Community Not Working

                                    I realize this is a bit of a meta topic, but the search for the various Zoho Communities appears to not be working. I'm under the impression that they run on some version of the Zoho Desk platform, so I'm posting this here.

                                  • Capture Stripe’s Customer ID

                                    Does anyone know of a way to capture Stripe’s customer ID that is created when the form/payment is processed? I would like to have the customer ID stored in our CRM so we could utilize in some custom functions down the road.

                                  • Custom Modules - Where are Comments??

                                    In the standard ticket module and in the tasks module, we have an interactive comment box that we can post important details/notes and can tag others if needed. Where is this functionality for Custom Modules? Ideally, custom modules would have very similar,

                                  • Dynamic Signature - Record owner

                                    Hi everyone, I’m using Zoho Writer merge templates from Zoho CRM and have two questions: Owner signature: How can I automatically insert the CRM record owner’s signature in the merged document? I’m not sure where this signature is stored or how to reference

                                  • Color of Text Box Changes

                                    Sometimes I find the color of text boxes changed to a different color. This seems to happen when I reopen the same slide deck later. In the image that I am attaching, you see that the colors of the whole "virus," the "irology" part of "virology," and

                                  • PUNJAB NATIONAL BANK (CORPORATE) INDIA - NOT AVAILABLE IN BANKING

                                    Dear sir, Kindly fix it. PUNJAB NATIONAL BANK (INDIA) is available but PUNJAB NATIONAL BANK (CORPORATE) is not available. Kindly enable this banking since we need to categorize the entries. Regards, Sanjay Jena email id/ user id : travewithmerchant@

                                  • Amazon invoice in Zoho Books

                                    I have just made my first few sales on Amazon India. Amazon Seller account generates invoices for the sales made on Amazon. These invoices are sent to customers also. Now when I was only making offline sales, I used to create Invoices in Zoho Book. Now

                                  • CUSTOM FUNCTION GIVE ERROR #EVAL!

                                    CUSTEM FUNCTION CREATE KYA ZOHOSHEET ME US FUNCTION KO USE KIYA LEKIN DATA TO SAHI HAI LAKIN DATA SHEET ME NAHI LAG LAHA HAI KRUPYA SOLVE KARE MY CODE IS float ADDTWO_TWO(float NO1, float NO2) { ADD = NO1 + NO2; return ADD; }

                                  • Zoho ShowTime: Certificates of Completion - Award your learners with a sense of achievement

                                    In our increasingly competitive market, professional trainers need to differentiate themselves if they are to survive. One way to do this is to focus on innovation and deliver an ideal learning experience. By developing a renowned certificate program that provides learners with a specialized skill set for a particular industry, both trainees and future prospects will recognize the trainer's leadership in that field. This can help with long-term growth, revenue generation, and even marketing and branding.

                                  • Shortcut to fill a range of cells

                                    Good evening: I'm writing because I haven't been able to find a feature that allows you to select a range of cells, type in one of them, and then use a key combination to type in all of them. In Excel, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Enter. I haven't found

                                  • Playback and Management Enhancements for Zoho Quartz Recordings

                                    Hello Zoho Team, We hope you're all doing well. We would like to submit a feature request related to Zoho Quartz, the tool used to record and share browser sessions with Zoho Support. 🎯 Current Functionality As of now, Zoho Quartz allows users to record

                                  • IMAP Migration from Gmail

                                    I have been trying to import my email from a Gmail server and keep receiving the following error. I have reduced the security, activated imap and no improvement. The link to the Google support item has not helped. Unable to connect to your account. Please

                                  • Your Incoming has been blocked and the emails will not be fetched in your Zoho account and POP Accounts Click here to get unblocked.

                                    When entering my account, this error is thrown at me, and I deleted a good part of my deleted messages, but I still can not unblock it, I would appreciate your help. reservas@lineasperutravel.com

                                  • Request for Creating Multiple Email Accounts on One Mobile Number

                                    Dear Zoho Team, I am planning to shift all my work-related communication to Zoho Mail because of its reliability and features. For my work, I need to create 3–4 separate email accounts for different purposes. Could you please confirm if it is possible

                                  • Signature issue

                                    Problem: The signature does not appear when replying or forwarding an email. solve issue: settintgs/Signature Check option place a signature above the content with quotation marks

                                  • mail admin not loading

                                    i am trying to login to mailadmin ... gears keeps rotating forever... its not a password issue whats so ever ... not cookies issues whatsoever from android app i can login but there so few things to do from there .. i changed ip address the same... i

                                  • Unify All Zoho Video Meeting Experiences into One Standardized Platform

                                    Hi Zoho Team, We would like to share an important user experience concern regarding the current state of video meeting functionality across the Zoho ecosystem. The Problem Within Zoho, there are multiple ways to initiate or schedule a video meeting: Zoho

                                  • Changing Account in Quote form does not update address information.

                                    I am trying to update the address information in a quote I've created. I corrected the address in the "Account" but that did not change in the quote. If I re-enter the Account Name in the Quote form, nothing updates. How do I fix this?

                                  • Zoho One Backup of entire account

                                    Hello, When using Zoho one is there a way to backup your entire account of all apps that you are using \ activively using in a single step or do you have to backup each applications data individually? Thanks,

                                  • ZIA in Zoho Cliq

                                    Is It possible to use the ZIA feature from Zoho Analytics in the Zoho Cliq?

                                  • Issue with “CC” and “Subject Details” of the initial mail when reply / replied all / forward using Zoho Mail Client (Desktop / Web Mail / Mobile App)

                                    It is observed that when I reply / reply all / forward a mail using Zoho Mail Client (Desktop / Web Mail / Mobile App), the “CC” and “Subject Details” are omitted from the mail which was replied/forwarded. However this is not the case with outlook mail

                                  • Unable to send Emails - 452 4.3.1 Temporary System Error

                                    Whene ever i request smtp server to send the email (without attachment). i recieve error "452 4.3.1 Temporary System Error"

                                  • I can't receive email

                                    I cannot receive any email sent to my Zoho email after the free upgrade plan trial is finished.

                                  • Help for the alisa adding

                                    Sorry, I would like to add a paypal alias on my domain email address. However, the system blocked it. How can I do it?

                                  • Problem with Writer and Workdrive

                                    Hi team, I’m the super admin for our Zoho One org. WorkDrive is active, and Zoho Docs is deprecated for our org. However, Zoho Writer cannot connect to WorkDrive at all — we’ve cleared cache, tried incognito, and restarted several times. I was able to

                                  • Lite plan attachment said 250mb but actually 25mb ?

                                    Lite plan attachment said 250mb but actually 25mb ? I can't attach over 25mb files, and can't receive mails has attached files over 25mb too

                                  • Zoho Books | Product updates | August 2025

                                    Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From the right sidebar where you can manage all your widgets, to integrating Zoho Payments feeds in Zoho Books, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience.

                                  • Closing Accounting Periods - Invoice/Posting dates

                                    Hi, I have seen in another thread but I'm unsure on how the 'transaction locking' works with regards to new and old transactions. When producing monthly accounts if I close December 24 accounts on 8th Jan 25 will transaction locking prevent me from posting

                                  • Constant color of a legend value

                                    It would be nice if we can set a constant color/pattern to a value when creating a chart. We would often use the same value in different graph options and I always have to copy the color that we've set to a certain value from a previous graph to make

                                  • Option to Customize Career Site URL Without “/jobs/Careers”

                                    Dear Zoho Recruit Team, I hope you are doing well. We would like to request an enhancement to the Career Site URL structure in Zoho Recruit. In the old version of the career site, our URL was simply: 👉 https://jobs.domain.com However, after moving to

                                  • Old vs New Value for Deleted Lookup Values

                                    Suppose the following scenario, where a value in a lookup is deleted: 1. User has countries form 2. Form A has a lookup to countries form 3. User selects Italy in Form A and saves it with the Italy ID 4. Form A report shows Italy 5. Italy is inadvertently

                                  • Next Page