![Understanding Data Preparation in the Analytics Life Cycle Data Preparation in the Analytical Life Cycle](https://blogs.sas.com/content/hiddeninsights/files/2018/12/93911066-702x336.jpg)
What is Data Preparation and why does it matter? Data preparation is all the tasks involved in collecting, processing, and cleansing data for use in analytics and business intelligence. It therefore includes accessing, loading, structuring, purging, unifying (joining), adjusting data types, checking fields to see that only valid values are