September 2020
Beginner
442 pages
9h 54m
English
Content preview from Tableau Prep: Up & Running
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 36. Handling Free Text
Free isn’t always a good thing. In data, free text is a perfect example of this. However, there are lots of benefits to be gained from the data entered in free text fields.
What Is Free Text?
Free text is the string-based data resulting from answers people type into systems and forms. Surveys, social media posts, and operational system notes can all have free-text data points. The resulting data is normally stored within one column, with one answer per cell. By definition, free text means the answer could be anything, and this is what you get—absolutely anything. From expletives to slang, the words you will find in the data may be a challenge to interpret, but free text is the best way to collect the true voice of your customer/employee.
The free-text field is likely to contain long, rambling sentences that cannot be analyzed simply. Most entries are entirely unique, so it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to conduct any meaningful analysis by simply counting the frequency of each instance. The analytical value is in the individual words/ID numbers within the submitted sentences and paragraphs.
Why Is Free Text Useful?
Capturing simple survey results as the percentage of people who feel strongly for or against something won’t give you much insight into where your business could improve. Hearing the “voice” of your customers in their own words will tell you more than even the best analysts in the world would be able to.
Free-text forms give you the ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.