MongoDB is a NoSQL database and one of the main difference compared to relational DB is you can put in your collection documents with different structure. In fact you don’t really care about structure of documents and type of data you are storing.
This is particularly true when you start using your Mongo instance with langage like PHP or JS where the langage itself does not manage data type explicitly.
As a consequence your document format may not be optimized (like storing numbers in String and making search on them later) and once you decide to move your backend to a more structured language like Java you start to have to make this more robust and organized. At this point you may want to reformat your documents to match the right type, eventually update your previous documents to a new version.
This kind of operation can be done “easily” with Mongo scripting language. This post will details 2 of the current structure to manipulate and transform Documents.