in Excel details matter if you have
minor inconsistencies in your data it
can actually cause major problems later
on for example I have a list of
salespeople and each one falls into one
of four regions north south east or west
but if you look closely you can see that
a couple of the values are a little bit
different it looks like North is
misspelled and West is also missing an E
and believe it or not these small
differences might actually cause us to
get the wrong result with certain
formulas or pivot tables now since we
have about 300 salespeople finding all
of the inconsistencies would be like
finding a needle in a haystack but I'm
going to show you a shortcut that's
going to make it a lot easier first
we'll need to apply a filter to the data
and you can get there from the sort and
filter command next we'll click the
filter drop-down arrow for the region
column now this is showing us a list of
all of the unique values in this column
and what we're going to do now is
deselect only the correct values so will
deselect east north south and west so
we're only leaving the incorrect values
checked then click OK and this filter
has basically pulled all of those
needles out of the haystack for us and
now we'll just need to manually fix each
one
and now if you click on the filter again
you can see that we've paired this down
to only the four values that we actually
want so now just select all and click OK
and now we know that all the values in
this column are nice and consistent
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