The Centre for Foundation Studies (CFS) of Kampar Campus and the Student Development Committee (SDC) organised a two-hour online workshop named Data Cleaning with Excel Workshop on 3 August 2022 via Microsoft Teams. The main objective of the workshop was to demonstrate a few techniques of cleaning up the raw data using Microsoft Excel.

The workshop was conducted by the assistant lecturer Chooi Wen Xin from UTAR Centre for Foundation Studies of Kampar Campus. Besides being a certified Microsoft Office Specialist and Excel Associate, Chooi also has 11 years of experience in teaching computing-related courses in UTAR. Chooi began the workshop by reminding participants to download the Excel workbook for hands-on learning. She then gave a brief introduction to the basics of data cleaning, which included useful shortcut keys, autofill, paste options and format cells by exemplifying them with the prepared worksheets.

The introduction then paved the way for the second section where Chooi explained how to change the text to different cases by using the lower, upper and proper functions, remove extra spaces by using the trim function, and combine both functions at once. Chooi then continued to show how to parse data using the Text to Column feature and join data using the Flash Fill feature. Next, Chooi went on to demonstrate how to select and treat random blank cells existing in a data set. She explained the importance of learning the right technique to avoid losing any wanted data as a result of deleting blank cells. In the next section, the participants were engaged in a hands-on activity. Chooi meticulously facilitated participants while they cleaned the second data set using all cleaning techniques taught earlier. 

The workshop ended with a brief Q&A session, followed by a group photo session. In general, the workshop received positive feedback from the participants. Most participants opined “very useful and insightful workshop”, “learned a lot of new knowledge from this (workshop)”, and “hopefully you will organise similar workshops like this in the future”. Another comment shared was “I like the teaching very much, it is clear and the teacher (shows) patience to students and answers every question”.