It seems that there is good value in a "SuperCleanup" tool that could take commonly used ways of writing information and cleaning this up automatically. This would work well if the tool reviewed the data in the column, and made a recommendation about the cleanup to apply. The tool could cleanup the data; and then pop any non-conforming values into a separate column for you to explictly clean up.
For example:
- 01 Jan 2015: this can be automatically cleaned up into a date
- 11:15 pm: this can be cleaned up into a time
- 40.7128° N, 74.0060° W; or 40° 43' 50.1960'' N and 73° 56' 6.8712'' W: Both could be auto-converted to a centroid
- $ 55.20 or £2,000,000.00 can be automatically converted to currency
- India; United States; Mongolia - can be automatically cleaned up as a country (there are only about 200 or so in the world, so it's a very finite list)
- NY; AZ; MI; can be cleaned up as US states
NOTE: if we make this extensible -then companies can auto cleanup SKUs; or location codes; etc
There are dozens of simple cleanups like this that we could add - which would each relieve BI people from the drudgery of having to clean these up each time themselves.
