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Datauntangler

No card required. The browser demo is free to use.

Excel data cleaning without a formula or a macro

Cleaning data in Excel usually means a column of helper formulas, a Remove Duplicates run and a Find and Replace you hope was safe. That works until the file is large or the fixes have to be explained. Save the sheet as CSV and clean it here instead.

In-browser your file never leaves your computer

Every row proposed to you before it is applied

CSV log of what you approved and rejected

Clean a file
01 Try it on this page

Load a messy sample and watch it work

The same engine described below, running on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is applied until you approve it.

1. Load a file

Your file is read on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, so nothing can leak.

Or start from a messy sample

Status

Loading the sample file.

File: CRM contact export

Rows

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Columns

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Changes

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Duplicate rows

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Date formats

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Blank emails

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Load a file to see the diff

Drop a CSV or pick one of the messy samples. Every proposed change appears here as a line you approve or reject.

02 About excel data cleaning

What Excel does well, and where it stops

Excel is excellent at inspecting data and at one-off edits. TRIM, PROPER, TEXT and Flash Fill will each fix a column, and Remove Duplicates will drop rows that are byte for byte identical.

The limits are real and worth naming. Remove Duplicates is an exact match, so Acme Corp and Acme Corp. both stay. It deletes rows in place and tells you only how many went, never which ones. Helper columns multiply until the sheet is fragile. And Excel will happily strip the leading zero off a postcode the moment the file opens.

The workflow

1. Save as CSV

In Excel, File then Save As, and pick CSV UTF-8. In Google Sheets, File then Download then Comma Separated Values.

2. Drop it in the browser

The file stays on your machine. Parsing and cleaning both run locally.

3. Read the proposals

One line per cell, with the original, the new value, and the rule that produced it.

4. Approve and download

You get the cleaned CSV plus a change log you can paste back into the workbook as its own sheet.

The leading zero problem, specifically

Excel treats 02139 as the number 2139 unless the column is formatted as text before the data arrives. Once it has been saved that way, the zero is gone from the file, not just from the display.

Datauntangler looks at the width the rest of the column agrees on and proposes restoring the missing zeros, one row at a time so you can see exactly which values it touched. Restoring a dropped zero in a postcode is part of address standardization, the near duplicates Remove Duplicates walks past are the job of fuzzy matching, and the data cleaning tool does both in one pass.

03 The spreadsheet workarounds

What the built in commands do to the file on the way

Excel is not a bad tool for this. It is a tool that changes things silently, which is a different problem.

What Remove Duplicates misses

Remove Duplicates matches exactly

It compares values character for character, so one trailing space or one legal suffix is enough for both copies of a customer to survive the run.

The file is reformatted as it opens

Leading zeros come off postcodes and account IDs and long numbers turn into scientific notation, before you have typed anything at all.

The undo history ends at the save

Once the workbook is saved and closed, the state before the clean is gone unless somebody thought to keep a copy first.

What to do with the sheet instead

Save it as CSV, read it in the browser, and get the proposals and the change log without editing the original workbook at all.

04 Before you run it

Questions about excel data cleaning

Can I upload the .xlsx directly?
The browser demo reads CSV and TSV. Saving a sheet as CSV takes a few seconds and keeps everything running locally.
Will my formulas survive?
A CSV holds values, not formulas. Clean the values here, then paste the cleaned column back into your workbook.
05 What it costs

Plans for when the file is bigger than the demo

Yearly billing is two months free. There is no free plan, and no card is needed to use the browser demo above.

Yearly billing is two months free.

Switch to yearly and two months are free.

Analyst

One ops person or analyst with files to clean.

$49$59/mo

Billed $590 a year Billed monthly

  • 50,000 rows a month
  • Files up to 25MB
  • 1 seat
  • Fuzzy matching and entity resolution
  • Reviewable diff and audit log export
  • 3 saved cleaning recipes
  • Email support

Team

Recommended

A RevOps or marketing ops team sharing the work.

$166$199/mo

Billed $1,990 a year Billed monthly

  • 250,000 rows a month
  • Files up to 100MB
  • 5 seats
  • Everything in Analyst
  • Unlimited saved recipes
  • Scheduled recurring cleans
  • CRM connectors (Salesforce, HubSpot)
  • Priority email support

Business

A data team cleaning for several departments.

$499$599/mo

Billed $5,990 a year Billed monthly

  • 1,500,000 rows a month
  • Files up to 500MB
  • 20 seats
  • Everything in Team
  • API access
  • Roles and permissions
  • Priority email support

Enterprise

A head of data who needs it defensible across the company.

Talk to sales

Custom terms, invoicing and PO

  • Unlimited rows and custom file sizes
  • Unlimited seats
  • Everything in Business
  • SSO (SAML / Okta)
  • Custom data retention
  • DPA on request
  • Named support contact
  • Invoicing and PO
  • Named onboarding

A row is one data line in a file you process, not counting the header. The browser demo is free to use and is not a plan: it reads CSV and TSV files up to 5MB on your own machine.

Related pages

Clean the file, and be able to show what you changed

Try the demo on your own CSV first. It runs in your browser, it costs nothing, and no card is required.

No card required. Your file never leaves your computer.

Clean a file