Data Preparation platforms enable analysts and domain experts to clean, blend, and shape data for analysis through visual, interactive workflows — without writing production pipeline code. Core capabilities include data profiling and anomaly surfacing, deduplication and fuzzy matching, standardization and normalization, joining across multiple sources, publishing prepared datasets for downstream BI or ML consumption, and lineage tracking on prepared outputs. The category spans dedicated prep tools and the prep modules inside broader analytics and data-science platforms. Leading vendors include Alteryx, Tableau Prep, Dataiku, and Power Query (Microsoft).