Working with spreadsheet data

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Bria Parker edited this page Sep 14, 2015 · 5 revisions

Common problems and tasks when working with spreadsheet data

Add your thoughts below for the next meeting. We'll discuss strategies and try to develop solutions at our next meeting.

[Please add your ideas/problems below!]

differences in line ending style (LF, CR, CRLF)
encoding issues
control characters and other tricky data in fields (for example hard returns inside Excel cells)
joining two CSV tables by matching a particular field
using regular expressions to clean up data
splitting multi-value fields into separate columns (for instance number+street+city+state+code)
detecting wrong formats on fields (for instance, barcodes that are too short or long)

Links to utilities and software helpful in solving these problems

[Please add your favorite tool below!]