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Data Manipulation

by Shalaka Joshi
Data manipulation is changing data to a readable format. This G2 guide provides in-depth information about data manipulation, its types, benefits, and best practices.

What is data manipulation?

Data manipulation involves altering, organizing, or managing data to make it more readable and useful. This process is essential in handling diverse forms of data, crucial for informed decision-making. Effective data analysis often relies heavily on the ability to manipulate data appropriately.

In practical use, data manipulation typically involves operations like inserting, deleting, and modifying data within a database. These processes are facilitated by Data Manipulation Language (DML), a coding language designed specifically for modifying data in its database environment. A common real-world application of data manipulation is in website management, where web server logs are analyzed to identify the most viewed web pages.

In business contexts, data manipulation is critical during data migration, ensuring that data is reorganized, cleaned, and stripped of unwanted elements as it is transferred between databases. This makes the data more accessible and easier to interpret, providing valuable insights to end users.

Related Glossary Terms

Shalaka Joshi
SJ

Shalaka Joshi

Shalaka is a Senior Research Analyst at G2, with a focus on data and design. Prior to joining G2, she has worked as a merchandiser in the apparel industry and also had a stint as a content writer. She loves reading and writing in her leisure.

Data Manipulation Software

This list shows the top software that mention data manipulation most on G2.

Microsoft Excel is a comprehensive spreadsheet application developed by Microsoft, designed to facilitate data organization, analysis, and visualization. As a core component of the Microsoft 365 suite, Excel is available across multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Since its initial release in 1985, Excel has become the industry standard for spreadsheet software, offering a robust set of tools for both personal and professional use. Key Features and Functionality: - Data Analysis and Visualization: Excel provides powerful tools such as PivotTables and PivotCharts, enabling users to analyze large datasets and create dynamic visual representations. - Formula and Function Support: With an extensive library of built-in functions, Excel allows users to perform complex calculations, statistical analyses, and data manipulations efficiently. - Integration with Programming Languages: Excel supports Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for automation and custom function creation. Additionally, recent updates have introduced support for the Python programming language, expanding its capabilities for data analysis and scripting. - AI-Powered Assistance: The integration of Microsoft Copilot introduces AI-driven features that assist with formula generation, data formatting, and insights, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity. - Collaboration and Sharing: Excel enables real-time collaboration, allowing multiple users to edit and comment on spreadsheets simultaneously, fostering teamwork and efficient data management. Primary Value and User Solutions: Excel addresses the need for a versatile and user-friendly platform for data management and analysis. Its comprehensive feature set empowers users to: - Organize Data Effectively: Users can structure and manage large volumes of data systematically, facilitating easy retrieval and reference. - Perform Complex Calculations: The extensive function library allows for intricate computations, catering to various professional fields such as finance, engineering, and statistics. - Visualize Data Insights: Through charts and graphs, Excel helps users interpret data trends and patterns, aiding in informed decision-making. - Automate Repetitive Tasks: With VBA and Python integration, users can automate routine processes, reducing manual effort and minimizing errors. - Collaborate Seamlessly: Real-time sharing and editing capabilities enhance teamwork, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to the most current data. By combining these features, Microsoft Excel serves as a powerful tool that simplifies complex data tasks, enhances productivity, and supports data-driven decision-making across various industries.

Alteryx drives transformational business outcomes through unified analytics, data science, and process automation.

UiPath enables business users with no coding skills to design and run robotic process automation

Tableau Server is a business intelligence application that provides browser-based analytics anyone can learn and use.

SQL Server 2017 brings the power of SQL Server to Windows, Linux and Docker containers for the first time ever, enabling developers to build intelligent applications using their preferred language and environment. Experience industry-leading performance, rest assured with innovative security features, transform your business with AI built-in, and deliver insights wherever your users are with mobile BI.

Smartsheet is a modern work management platform that helps teams manage projects, automate processes, and scale workflows all in one central platform.

Power BI Desktop is part of the Power BI product suite. Use Power BI Desktop to create and distribute BI content. To monitor key data and share dashboards and reports, use the Power BI web service. To view and interact with your data on any mobile device, get the Power BI Mobile app on the AppStore, Google Play or the Microsoft Store. To embed stunning, fully interactive reports and visuals into your applications use Power BI Embedded

Pandas is a powerful and flexible open-source Python library designed for data analysis and manipulation. It provides fast, efficient, and intuitive data structures, such as DataFrame and Series, which simplify handling structured (tabular, multidimensional, potentially heterogeneous) and time series data. Pandas aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for practical, real-world data analysis in Python, offering a wide range of functionalities to streamline data processing tasks. Key Features and Functionality: - Handling Missing Data: Pandas offers easy handling of missing data, represented as `NaN`, `NA`, or `NaT`, in both floating point and non-floating point data. - Size Mutability: Columns can be inserted and deleted from DataFrame and higher-dimensional objects, allowing for dynamic data manipulation. - Data Alignment: Automatic and explicit data alignment ensures that objects can be aligned to a set of labels, facilitating accurate computations. - Group By Operations: Powerful and flexible group by functionality enables split-apply-combine operations on datasets for both aggregating and transforming data. - Data Conversion: Simplifies converting differently-indexed data in other Python and NumPy data structures into DataFrame objects. - Indexing and Subsetting: Provides intelligent label-based slicing, fancy indexing, and subsetting of large datasets. - Merging and Joining: Facilitates intuitive merging and joining of datasets. - Reshaping and Pivoting: Offers flexible reshaping and pivoting of datasets. - Hierarchical Labeling: Supports hierarchical labeling of axes, allowing multiple labels per tick. - Robust I/O Tools: Includes robust tools for loading data from flat files (CSV and delimited), Excel files, databases, and saving/loading data from the ultrafast HDF5 format. - Time Series Functionality: Provides time series-specific functionality, including date range generation, frequency conversion, moving window statistics, and date shifting and lagging. Primary Value and User Solutions: Pandas addresses the challenges of data analysis by offering a comprehensive suite of tools that simplify the process of data manipulation, cleaning, and analysis. Its intuitive data structures and functions allow users to perform complex operations with minimal code, enhancing productivity and enabling efficient handling of large datasets. By providing seamless integration with other Python libraries and tools, Pandas serves as a cornerstone for data science workflows, empowering users to extract insights and make data-driven decisions effectively.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise is an RPA platform architected for the digital enterprise.

DemandTools is a data quality toolset for Salesforce CRM. De-deduplication, normalization, standardization, comparison, import, export, mass delete, and more.

In addition to our open-source data science software, RStudio produces RStudio Team, a unique, modular platform of enterprise-ready professional software products that enable teams to adopt R, Python, and other open-source data science software at scale.

IBM SPSS Statistics is an integrated family of products that addresses the entire analytical process, from planning to data collection to analysis, reporting and deployment.

Airtable is the all-in-one collaboration platform designed to combine the flexibility of a spreadsheet interface with features like file attachments, kanban card stacks, revision history, calendars and reporting.

UltraEdit is a powerful text editor and code editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux that supports nearly any programming language and easily handles huge (4+ GB) files. Includes (S)FTP, SSH console, powerful find/replace with Perl regex support, scripting / macros, and more.

Google Workspace enables teams of all sizes to connect, create and collaborate. It includes productivity and collaboration tools for all the ways that we work: Gmail for custom business email, Drive for cloud storage, Docs for word processing, Meet for video and voice conferencing, Chat for team messaging, Slides for presentation building, shared Calendars, and many more.

Office Productivity Suite Includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

SurveyMonkey is a leading survey and feedback management solution, trusted by millions of users across more than 300,000 organizations around the world. SurveyMonkey and its AI-powered tools empower organizations of all sizes to deliver world-class experiences for their employees, customers, and stakeholders.

SAS/STAT includes exact techniques for small data sets, high-performance statistical modeling tools for large data tasks and modern methods for analyzing data with missing values.

SAS Enterprise Guide is a Windows-based client application that provides a user-friendly, point-and-click interface to the powerful analytics capabilities of SAS software. Designed to cater to both novice and experienced users, it facilitates data access, management, analysis, and reporting without the need for extensive programming knowledge. By integrating a wide array of analytical tasks with an intuitive graphical interface, SAS Enterprise Guide empowers users to efficiently conduct complex analyses and share results across their organization. Key Features and Functionality: - Intuitive Interface and Wizards: Offers guided access to SAS capabilities, from basic reporting to advanced analyses, through flexible wizards and an intuitive process flow diagram facility. - Comprehensive Analytical Tasks: Includes over 100 prebuilt tasks for descriptive statistics, predictive modeling, regression analysis, and more, enabling users to perform complex analyses without writing code. - Data Management: Provides a powerful graphical query builder for accessing and manipulating various data types, including SAS datasets and native Windows data types, without requiring SQL expertise. - OLAP Access and Visualization: Supports dynamic slicing, drilling, and pivoting of data for exploration, with integration capabilities for SAS OLAP Server and other third-party vendors supporting OLE DB for OLAP. - Result Distribution and Sharing: Facilitates the distribution of results through multiple channels, including SAS BI report/content repository, Microsoft Office documents, and email, ensuring seamless sharing and collaboration. - High-Performance Computing and Grid Enablement: Automatically detects grid environments for efficient processing, analyzes SAS programs to optimize performance, and enables parallel execution of tasks on the same server. Primary Value and User Solutions: SAS Enterprise Guide addresses the need for a self-service analytics environment that empowers business analysts and other users to perform sophisticated data analyses without relying heavily on IT departments. By providing guided access to data integration, preparation, analytics, and reporting, it enables users to quickly access data, conduct analyses, and distribute results, thereby accelerating decision-making processes. The integration with SAS Viya further enhances its capabilities, allowing users to leverage modern, cloud-based platforms for scalable and efficient analytics. This comprehensive toolset ultimately helps organizations harness their data effectively, leading to more informed business decisions and improved operational efficiency.

Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) developed by Microsoft, combining the relational Access Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software development tools. As part of the Microsoft 365 suite, Access enables users to create, manage, and analyze databases efficiently. It allows for the development of application software and supports integration with various data sources, including SQL Server and Oracle, through ODBC compatibility. Access is designed to facilitate rapid application development (RAD), making it suitable for both novice users and experienced developers. Key Features and Functionality: - Data Storage and Management: Access stores data in its own format based on the Access Database Engine and can import or link directly to data stored in other applications and databases. - User Interface Design: It provides tools to create forms and reports, enabling users to design intuitive interfaces for data entry and analysis. - Query and Reporting Tools: Access includes a query interface and report creation features that can work with any data source that Access can access. - Programming Support: Access supports Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), allowing for advanced automation, data validation, and error trapping. - Integration Capabilities: It can link to data in its existing location and use it for viewing, querying, editing, and reporting, allowing the existing data to change while ensuring that Access uses the latest data. Primary Value and User Solutions: Microsoft Access provides a versatile platform for users to develop custom database solutions tailored to their specific needs. Its integration with other Microsoft Office applications enhances productivity by allowing seamless data sharing and reporting. Access's user-friendly interface and robust functionality make it an ideal choice for small to medium-sized businesses, educational institutions, and individual users seeking to manage and analyze data effectively without requiring extensive programming knowledge.