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Stop 08 · Data Cleaning & WranglingTopics · 4/9

Data Type Conversion

Part of the Data Analyst Roadmap

In short

Fixing columns that were imported as the wrong type — dates read as text, numbers read as strings with commas — a small but extremely common source of broken calculations.

How to learn this

  1. 1Practice converting a text 'date-looking' column into an actual date type.
  2. 2Learn to spot when a numeric column has been silently imported as text.
  3. 3Check data types immediately after importing any new dataset, as a habit.

More topics at this stop

Identifying Data Quality IssuesHandling Missing DataHandling DuplicatesOutlier HandlingStandardizing & Normalizing DataData Validation RulesETL Basics (Extract, Transform, Load)Documenting Data Cleaning Decisions

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