What is Reshape.XL
Reshape.XL come from my own needs in day-to-day work with data. 90 % of the data I receive for processing is stored in the form of Excel files. These data are in the different structure, they have variable quality and size. They must always to be cleaned, transformed and processed. 80 % of the time I spent with their cleaning and editing.
I needed some good tool directly inside the Excel, which I could use as well as my colleagues. I thought about this idea for a long time. Gradually, I came with the idea of its architecture and I had suggested the interface in which this solution would work. In the summer of 2018 I started programming and in September the first version was finished.
The basic requirement was to be very simple to use. The second requirement was its complexity. This tool should provide complex data handling capabilities so we do not have to combine its functionality with other tools.
The result of this effort, you can try yourself. The functionality of Reshape.XL add-in is at the level of professional data-science tools, but its use is easier in many ways. Numerous data wrangling steps are easier in this add-in than in the Excel spreadsheet.
Reshape.XL is a data science tool for daily use. You can use it for data wrangling and data processing and add-in is fully integrated into the Excel interface. Its installation is simple and fast. If you use it, it will replace a lot of Excel functionality that is not easy to use such as complex formulas.
Imagine one use case. From an input dataset that contains 50 columns and 30 000 rows, you want to select three columns and arrange them in a different order (e.g. the last column at the beginning). Consequently, you want to select unique rows according to 2 columns and clear rows with missing values. Then you want to join this table with another, existing in the second Excel file. Finally, you want to group all rows by two columns that contain categorical values and for these two-column categories you want to calculate the average values of the selected variable for each year. At the end, you want to transform the table into the form where individual years are displayed in columns and not in rows.
Such type of data transformations is relatively complex if you want to use the built-in Excel functionality and its correct definition takes a lot of time. In the case of the Reshape.XL add-in, this is a simple request that will not take you more than 2-3 minutes. This way you can save a lot of time for the more important tasks. If you want to perform advanced data transformations in Excel, Reshape.XL is the right choice for you.
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