Toolkits

Open Refine: It’s an online data cleaning tool that helps to organize data by their facets. Through Open Refine, I was able to split the country names in Acquisition and Target section but failed to get rid of the repetition of the same country in a cell.

Excel Visual Basic Macro: Excel VB Macro is also a tool that aims to eliminate duplicates in a cell. I used an online tutorial that helped to embed a VBA code in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window in Excel. However, this code did not work for my data and I haven’t found a way to debug it.

Tableau: I used Tableau for both my data cleaning and visualization. By applying the same methodology, I applied in Open Refine, I was able to isolate the acquirer countries and target countries but failed to prevent duplicate. After trying a few methods, I find using Tableau is the most efficient tool since the processed data can be visualized immediately, saving a lot of time in exporting different files. However, because the data is not fully cleaned up and there is missing data spread throughout the collection, the numbers shown in the visualized form are erroneous, which I will further explain in the visualization section.