Cleaning Up Your Excel 2013 Data

Learn how to clean up your Excel data with a few simple and easy-to-understand functions, commands, and techniques.

Need to get data from a business-management system file, database software, text file, or poorly designed Excel worksheet into optimal shape for Excel 2013? This course can help. Dennis Taylor explores the functions, commands, and techniques in Excel that restructure data, remove unwanted characters, convert data into the desired format, and prepare data for efficient analysis. He'll cover adjusting row and column placement; transposing data with Replace and Substitute functions, the Text to Columns command, and the new Flash Fill; and formatting and converting text, numbers, and other values.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files

1. Readjusting Data Layouts

• Moving and inserting rows and columns of data with a simple drag
• Transposing row-column layouts into column-row layouts
• Using Sort to eliminate empty rows and columns

2. Replacing Data at the Character Level

• Replacing data with the Replace command and SUBSTITUTE function
• Dealing with special characters, wildcards, and the REPLACE function
• Removing leading single quotes
• Removing trailing minus signs while converting data to negative values

3. Adjusting Date-Like Data

• Splitting unusual date formats into columns
• Using the Text to Columns command for selected date formats
• Using the DATEVALUE and TIMEVALUE functions
• Converting between time units: Day/hour, year/day, etc.
• Converting to and from Julian dates

4. Working with Number-Text Conversion Issues

• Converting text data to values
• Using error-checking options to convert text data to values
• Adding leading zeros

5. Using Spell Checker and AutoCorrect

• Correcting multiple misspellings
• Creating data-entry shortcuts via the AutoCorrect feature

6. Using Specialized Techniques

• Using text functions
• Filling in missing title information
• Combining data via concatenation and Flash Fill
• Splitting data into multiple columns with Text to Columns
• Understanding Text to Columns and Flash Fill differences

Conclusion

• Next steps