Cleaning Excel data without formulas
The usual Excel approach — TRIM(), PROPER(), LOWER(), helper columns, Remove Duplicates and Text to Columns — works, but it's slow, easy to get wrong, and has to be rebuilt every time a new export arrives. Helper columns also have to be copied and pasted as values before you can delete the originals.
TheSpreadFix replaces those steps with a report and a checklist: you see what's wrong across the whole sheet at once, choose fixes, and download a clean copy. The fixes can be saved as a recipe and re-applied to next week's workbook.
How Excel silently changes your data — and how to avoid it
Excel tries to be helpful when it opens files, which can quietly corrupt data:
- Leading zeros disappear from PIN codes, ZIP codes and product codes (00123 becomes 123).
- Long numbers such as card or account numbers become scientific notation and lose digits after the 15th.
- Phone numbers starting with + are treated as formulas or numbers.
- Text that looks like a date (e.g. 3-4) is converted into a date.
In the Excel files you download from TheSpreadFix, only plain numbers without leading zeros are stored as numbers. Everything else — codes, IDs, phone numbers — is stored as text, so it looks exactly the way it should.
Careful capitalisation
PROPER() in Excel turns “McDonald” into “Mcdonald” and “O'BRIEN” into “O'Brien” but also “don't” into “Don'T”. TheSpreadFix only converts values that are entirely upper or lower case, leaves deliberately mixed-case names alone, and handles apostrophes sensibly (O'Brien, D'Souza, Don't).
Workbooks with several sheets, titles and formulas
If your workbook has several sheets, choose the one to clean after uploading. Blank rows above the table and empty leading columns are skipped automatically; if the sheet has a title row above the headers, delete it first so the real header row is used. Formulas are read as their last calculated values — what you want in a clean data file — and your original workbook is never changed.