Ultimate guide to data cleaning in Excel

Data cleaning is one of the necessary excel skills that you are expected to possess today.

A data set might be having certain inconsistencies, and to make it more presentable and to help proper understanding of the data it is necessary to make the data look better and error-free.

This article describes 11 techniques to help you 'clean' data in Excel:

• Run a spell check.
• Make the text case consistent.
• Remove any extra spaces.
• Clear all formatting, comments, hyperlinks.
• Treat cells containing errors.
• Use 'Find and Replace' feature to make data look better.
• Replace or substitute text.
• Replace blank cells with '0', 'No Value', 'Nothing', 'Not Available', etc.
• Treat duplicates.
• Merging contents of columns.
• Splitting contents of a column.