Forum Discussion
CSV import has extra commas, bad data in fields, any way to do data cleaning?
I've got a very large file with names, addresses and a bunch of other stuff, built by people worse than the lowest-cost vendor. 99% of the data is good, but some names and addresses have commas in them, and there are a lot of "wrong" entries. And these files are about as big as excel can handle.
Is there a way to import CSVs into excel that will flag rows with too many or too few fields (compared to the average field size)? Then allow me to merge two cells, inserting a comma, and shift everything else left? (e.g. if "smith" and "Jr" are in two adjacent cells, merge them into "Smith, Jr"?)
Is there a way to specify a pattern on a column --stuff like cell formatting options, and all-alpha, all numeric, specify a cell should be a single alpha that must be one of "A,J,N,Q", a string that matches a list ("red", "blue", "green2"), numeric and a range, ...) and highlight the cells that don't match?