What is Data Import: 6 Benefits of Having a Data Import Tool

Published on: 05/02/2023 | Updated on: October 24, 2024

If you’re reading this article, it’s probably because your business has been stuck using Excel as its primary tool for data management. It’s 2023 – there are better options! For example, big data management services! Many business owners want to find out what is data import for their business data needs.

Excel is an amazing tool and can do so much for you and your business. However, when it comes to managing data in a business environment, it isn’t the best fit. This is because a spreadsheet or CSV file just isn’t designed to store and query large or diverse datasets.

With data onboarding software like Dromo, you can migrate data out of spreadsheets and CSV files and ingest it into a database with ease.

What is Data Import and What are Some Benefits of Using It?

Data import can help you to move all of your data into the right form so you can sort it out and understand the hidden insights that are found with it. There are a number of benefits to figuring out what is data import for your needs including:

6 Benefits of Having a Data Import Tool

Guaranteed Data Quality

In order to get value out of data, your data must be correct. This is especially important when you want to share data outside of your company. For example, let’s say that you have an operations team who regularly visits different car dealerships in their region.

Their job is to collect data about the sales strategies that work for selling different types of cars, so that these insights can be sold back to the dealerships. They capture that data in an Excel spreadsheet, but it could be full of errors. Before sharing it back to the customer, you need to run it through a quality control process to validate it.

Databases are designed to reject bad data. For example, if a value is missing from a required column, the database will reject the entire row. Databases can implement all kinds of validation rules, including preventing duplicate values, ensuring that a related object exists, or specifying the minimum or maximum value of a cell.

Excel, by contrast, does not enforce data validation rules. Though you can set some soft constraints for a cell, a user can easily override them by simply copying and pasting data over it. You can use conditional formatting to highlight cells with errors, but this is very different from guaranteeing that all the data is correct. 

Migrating from Excel into a database requires you to pass your data through a quality control filter, guaranteeing the quality of the data. Ensuring your information is accurate will save a lot of time and frustration in the long run.

Advanced Business Intelligence (BI) and Reporting

The next big benefit of using data onboarding software for your business is that it can help you bring together all of your data from different departments. This can include data from marketing, sales, product, finance, and even HR.

This is known as BI and is the ability to use all of this data to make better and more informed business decisions. For example, let’s say that your marketing team regularly circulates Excel spreadsheets containing the costs of different marketing campaigns. The sales team circulates different spreadsheets reporting on the sales won from each campaign.

Your finance team is interested in combining this data to calculate the ROI of marketing spend by the campaign. This query is difficult to perform across disparate spreadsheets, but very easy with a database. By onboarding your spreadsheet data into a database, you can provide a complete picture of the impact of marketing to the finance team.

To do BI and reporting well, your data must be consistent, accurate, and up-to-date. This is especially important in the modern business environment where companies are expected to move quickly and compete on a global scale.

More Impactful Collaboration Between Team Members

When a team member receives a spreadsheet full of errors, cleaning it up is a huge drain of time and energy. Whether she’s a data scientist, sales manager, or marketer, she has better things to do than sift through reams of haphazardly formatted spreadsheets. If it is difficult to share data, team members do it less frequently, reducing collaboration over time.

When your team members can spend more time discussing the meaning of data and less time cleaning up raw data themselves, they have more impactful communication with one another. Freed from distracting busy work, they can work together to focus on delivering better products and services for your customers.

Decreased Operational Costs

Lastly, getting data out of Excel helps you save money in the long term. By standardizing data across your company, you reduce the cost of resolving conflicting formats across different teams.

You also reduce the hours of tedious labor spent hunting down bad data in spreadsheets, and the cost of replacing team members who quit in frustration because they resent this type of grunt work. Most importantly, migrating data into a database makes it easier to actually use the data you’ve collected to discover new insights and make better business decisions.

Saves time and reduces errors

The data import tool is a timesaver, reducing the potential for errors due to human intervention in the data processing workflow. It’s as simple as importing one or multiple Excel files into a database – no data preparation needed! This handy tool can detect inconsistencies and effortlessly convert your Excel data into a table format.

Enhances productivity and efficiency

In this era of Artificial Intelligence, life is progressing at a rapid pace. To ensure maximum productivity and efficiency, data import tools prove invaluable. Rather than manually copying and pasting data into different platforms such as Excel and databases, these tools are able to complete the task in just a few minutes, making it easy, fast, secure and fully automated to move data from one place to another.

The data import tool facilitates effortless access to numerous data sources, enabling users to quickly collect a single set of data from multiple platforms to be used for reporting, analysis and visualization.

Conclusion

Excel is a great tool for businesses. However, there are many advantages to onboarding data out of Excel and into standardized forms, such as databases. Modern data onboarding software like Dromo makes this easy to implement in minutes, enabling you to ingest spreadsheet data with ease and finally move beyond Excel.