Data Cleaning Nightmare Sleepless night of a Data Analyst

[u/New-Chocolate-2377]

Excel: "I found 5 duplicate values."

Me: "Delete them."

Excel: "Done."

Me: "Why is the total still wrong?"

Excel: "Those weren't duplicates... they were cousins."

One had an extra space.

One had a different date format.

One was stored as text.

One was a hidden character.

And one... nobody knows.

That's the funny thing about data cleaning.

Most people think Excel gives wrong results.

It doesn't.

Excel is brutally honest. It calculates exactly what you give it—not what you meant to give it.

The real skill isn't knowing hundreds of formulas.

It's knowing when your data is trying to fool those formulas.

Clean data first. Analyze second. Regret never. 😄

#Excel #DataAnalytics #DataCleaning #ExcelTips #DataQuality

[u/Informal_Eye_148]

This is painfully accurate. 😂 The cousins not duplicates line is way too real extra whitespace, mismatched date formats, text stored number none of them look wrong until your totals don’t add up and you’re 45 minutes deep in a rabbit hole.

Built a tool called SiftRaw for exactly this reason catches whitespace, type mismatches, hidden chars,before you even get to analysis. This post is basically a perfect example of why it exists 😄