We live in a data world. Businesses increasingly rely on data to better understand people (customers, competitors, etc.) along with products and services, identify trends, predict future growth (trends and forecasting), and report that rely on data aggregation, summarization, and visual analysis. How does a business gather all of that data? That is where data extraction comes in.

Data Extraction involves gathering information from many different types of sources, whether structured (spreadsheets) or unstructured (website or PDF), and putting it into a format ready for aggregation or analysis. It is the first and most crucial step in turning raw data into usable insights.

As businesses have become increasingly “data-driven,” data extraction has become essential to remain competitive in a growing field of data collection. New technologies, including artificial intelligence, web scraping, APIs, and ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load systems), have made extracting data from multiple sources easier and faster.