Sample preparation procedures in use in many application areas are still tedious and manually intensive protocols. These characteristics mean that sample treatment is considered the most time-consuming and error-prone part of the analytical scheme. The increasing demand for faster, more cost-effective and environmental friendly analytical methods is a major incentive to improve these conventional procedures and has spurred research in this field during the last decades. This review provides an overview of the most relevant developments and successful approaches proposed in recent years concerning sample preparation. The current state-of-the-art is discussed on the basis of examples selected from representative application areas and involving conventional instrumental techniques for the final determination of the target compounds. Emphasis will be on those techniques and approaches that have already demonstrated their practicality by the analysis of real-life samples, and in particular on those dealing with the determination of minor organic components. The potential of the latest developments in this field for sample treatment simplification and complete hyphenation and integration of analytical process is discussed and the most pressing remaining limitations evaluated