Excel is not a data cleaning tool 💾

I keep seeing Facebook posts that have tips and tricks for data cleaning and processing with Microsoft Excel. Honestly I don’t recommend it.

Excel is fine for reviewing outputted data and very light weight data work, but you are much better off to use R and tidyverse or Python and PANDAS for all but the simplest data work. Often storing data is best done using a Parquet but don’t assume most people even know what one is.

Spreadsheets are not databases or for processing data. They’re excellent for reviewing data and transferring it between people in a format nearly anybody can understand but don’t try to get cute with Excel formulas and try to do things in Excel you really should use a data library to process and a database to store in.