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

    • Recent Topics

    • Calls where the local audio is shared, have echo

      When another user is sharing their screen with audio, I get echo from my own voice. We tested this with multiple users, with different audio setups, and there's no obvious way to fix it. Is this a bug you could look into, or are we missing something?

    • Update application by uploading an updated DS file

      Is it possible? I have been working with AI on my desktop improving my application, and I have to keep copy pasting stuff... Would it be possible to import the DS file on top of an existing application to update the app accordingly?

    • Markdown support, code cells...

      Hi Zoho I'd like to vote for a feature that markdown is supported with: Headings Code highlighting Quoteblocks ... Furthermore a inline card(like inline sketch card) for special text like Code would be great. And just to add my vote as well for "Tags"!

    • Minimise chat when user navigates to new page

      When the user is in an active chat (chatbot) and is provide with an internal link, when they click the link to go to the internal page the chat opens again. This is not a good user experience. They have been sent the link to read what is on the page.

    • Zoho Projects app update: Voice notes for Tasks and Bugs module

      Hello everyone! In the latest version(v3.9.37) of the Zoho Projects Android app update, we have introduced voice notes for the Tasks and Bugs module. The voice notes can be added as an attachment or can be transcribed into text. Recording and attaching

    • zurl URL shortener Not working in Zoho social

      zurl URL shortener Not working in while creating a post in Zoho social

    • In the Zoho CRM Module I have TRN Field I should contain 15 digit Number , If it Contain less than 15 digit Then show Alert message on save of the button , If it not contain any number not want to sh

      Hi In the Zoho CRM Module I have TRN Field I should contain 15 digit Number , If it Contain less than 15 digit Then show Alert message on save of the button , If it not contain any number not want to show alert. How We can achive in Zoho CRm Using custom

    • Zoho Bookings know-how: A hands-on workshop series

      Hello! We’re conducting a hands-on workshop series to help simplify appointment scheduling for your business with Zoho Bookings. We’ll be covering various functionalities and showing how you can leverage them for your business across five different sessions.

    • Custom report

      Hello Everyone I hope everything is fine. I've tried to To change the layout of the reports, especially the summary page report, and I want to divide summary of each section in the survey but I can't For example: I have a survey containing five different

    • Zoho Journey - ZOHO MARKETING AUTOMATION

      I’ve encountered an issue while working with a journey in Zoho Marketing Automation. After creating the journey, I wanted to edit the "Match Criteria" settings. Unfortunately: The criteria section appears to be locked and not editable. I’m also unable

    • Custom Fields in PDF outputs

      I created a couple of custom fields. e.g Country of Origin and HS Tariff Code. I need these to appear on a clone of a sales order PDF template but on on the standard PDF template. When I select "appear on PDFs' it appears on both but when I don't select

    • How to create a Service Agreement with Quarterly Estimate

      Hello, I'm not sure if this has been asked before so please don't get mad at me for asking. We're an NDIS provider in Australia so we need to draft a Service Agreement for our client. With the recent changes in the NDIS we're now required to also include

    • Change Currency symbol

      I would like to change the way our currency displays when printed on quotes, invoices and purchase orders. Currently, we have Australian Dollars AUD as our Home Currency. The only two symbol choices available for this currency are "AU $" or "AUD". I would

    • Zoho Social - Post Footer Templates

      As a content creator I often want to include some information at the end of most posts. It would be great if there was an option to add pre-written footers, similar to the Hashtag Groups at the end of posts. For example, if there is an offer I'm running

    • Allow to pick color for project groups in Zoho Projects

      Hi Zoho Team, It would be really helpful if users could assign colors to project groups. This would make it easier to visually distinguish groups, improve navigation, and give a clearer overview when managing multiple projects. Thanks for considering

    • Zoho Books - Quotes to Sales Order Automation

      Hi Books team, In the Quote settings there is an option to convert a Quote to an Invoice upon acceptance, but there is not feature to convert a Quote to a Sales Order (see screenshot below) For users selling products through Zoho Inventory, the workflow

    • Can't find imported leads

      Hi There I have imported leads into the CRM via a .xls document, and the import is showing up as having been successful, however - when I try and locate the leads in the CRM system, I cannot find them.  1. There are no filters applied  2. They are not

    • Custom Button Disappearing in mobile view | Zoho CRM Canvas

      I'm working in Zoho CRM Canvas to create a custom view for our sales team. One of the features I'm adding is a custom button that opens the leads address in another tab. I've had no issue with this in the desktop view, but in the mobile view the button

    • The connected workflow is a great idea just needs Projects Integrations

      I just discovered the connected workflows in CRM and its a Great Idea i wish it was integrated with Zoho Projects I will explain our use case I am already trying to do something like connected workflow with zoho flow Our requirement was to Create a Task

    • Zoho Projects MCP Feedback

      I've started using the MCP connector with Zoho Projects, and the features that exist really do work quite well - I feel this is going to be a major update to the Zoho Ecosystem. In projects a major missing feature is the ability to manage, (especially

    • email template

      How do I create and save an email template

    • Enhancements in Portal User Group creation flow

      Hello everyone, Before introducing new Portal features, here are some changes to the UI of Portals page to improve the user experience. Some tabs and options have been repositioned so that users can better access the functionalities of the feature. From

    • Can I add Conditional merge tags on my Templates?

      Hi I was wondering if I can use Conditional Mail Merge tags inside my Email templates/Quotes etc within the CRM? In spanish and in our business we use gender and academic degree salutations , ie: Dr., Dra., Sr., Srta., so the beginning of an email / letter

    • email moderation issue when email is sent in the name of a mail group

      Symptom: an email that is sent by a mail group moderator in the name of a moderated mail group is held back for approval. Reproduction: Create a moderated mail group with members and moderators. Allow that mails can be sent in the name of the group (extended settings). Send an email to the group as a group moderator, but in the name of the group. This mail is held back for moderation which is unexpected. Expected: A mail sent by group moderator to a moderated group are not held back for moderation

    • blank page after login

      blank page after logging into my email account Thanks you

    • Always display images from this sender – Is this feature available?

      In Zoho mail, I had my "Load external images" setting set to "Ask me", and that's fine. That's the setting I prefer. What's not fine though is I always need to tick "Display now" for each email I get, regardless if I've done that multiple times from several

    • Function #9: Copy attachments of Sales Order to Purchase Order on conversion

      This week, we have written a custom function that automatically copies the attachments uploaded for a sales order to the corresponding purchase order after you convert it. Here's how to configure it in your Zoho Books organization. Custom Function: Hit

    • Free webinar: Security that works: Building resilience for the AI-powered workforce

      Hello there, Did you know that more than 51% of organizations worldwide have experienced one or more security breaches, each costing over $1 million in losses or incident response? In today’s threat landscape, simply playing defense is no longer enough.

    • Zoho Notebook Sync problem

      I'm facing a problem with syncing of notebook on android app. It's not syncing. Sometimes it syncs after a day or two.  I created some notes on web notebook but it's not syncing on mobile app. Please help!!!!

    • Cant Save Gauge on Creator Page

      How to Save Gauge on Creator Page see movie https://vimeo.com/1116410860?share=copy#t=0

    • Apply Advance option not shown in report

      We are facing an issue in Zoho Expenses. While approving an Expense Report, the "Apply Advance" option is not appearing under the three dots (More Options). Details: Module: Expense Reports Issue: "Apply Advance" option not visible Status of Report: Awaiting

    • Auto Capitalize First Letter of Words

      Hi I am completely new to ZOHO and am trying to build a database. How can i make it when a address is entered into a form field like this: main st it automatically changes is to show: Main St Thank You

    • Follow-up emails via Workflow Automation not staying in the same thread

      Dear Zoho Support Team, I am currently using Workflow Automation in Zoho Campaigns to send follow-up emails. In my test case, I noticed the following behavior: All emails in the automation have the same subject line. If the follow-up email is sent within

    • Client Script refuses to set an initial value in Subform field

      I tried a very simple, 1 line client script to set a default value in a custom subform field when the "Add Row" button is clicked and the user is entering data. It does not work - can someone tell me why? ZDK documentation suggests this should be doable.

    • Help Center IFrame Issue

      I have had a working Help Center on my website using an iframe for a while. But now for some reason the sign in page gets a refused to connect error. Can someone please help. If I go to the url manually it works correclty

    • Comment Templates

      Is it possible to add a template option for comments? We have some agents in the process who's responses require a pre-formatted layout. It would be incredibly handy to have a template for them where they can insert the template and then add their responses

    • [ZohoDesk] Improve Status View with a new editeble kanban view

      A kanban view with more information about the ticket and the contact who created the ticket would be valueble. I would like to edit the fields with the ones i like to see at one glance. Like in CRM where you can edit the canvas view, i would like to edit

    • Adding Markdown text using Zoho Desk API into the Knowledge Base

      Hi Zoho Community members, We currently maintain the documentation of out company in its website. This documentation is written in markdown text format and we would like to add it in Zoho Knowledge Base. Do you know if there is REST API functionality

    • An Exclusive Session for Zoho Desk Users: AI in Zoho Desk

      A Zoho Community Learning Initiative Hello everyone! This is an announcement for Zoho Desk users and anyone exploring Zoho Desk. With every nook and corner buzzing, "AI's here, AI's there," it's the right time for us to take a closer look at how the AI

    • Shared values: From classroom lessons to teaching moments in customer service

      While the world observes Teachers’ Day on October 5, in India, we celebrate a month earlier, on September 5, to mark the birth anniversary of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a great teacher, renowned scholar, educationist, and advocate for empowerment.

    • Next Page