Question

An analyst imports a sales export into a data prep tool and notices that the 'Revenue' column will not sum correctly—values like '1,250.00' and '  980.50 ' produce errors during aggregation. Profiling reveals the column is typed as text. Which sequence of transformations should the analyst apply to make the column reliably summable?

Accepted Answer

Trim whitespace and remove thousands separators, then cast the column from text to a decimal/numeric data type

Answer

Cast the column to numeric first, then trim whitespace and strip the commas from the resulting numbers

Answer

Replace all null revenue values with zero, then leave the column as text for aggregation

Answer

Concatenate a currency symbol to each value so the tool recognizes it as money