WEBVTT
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Language: en

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In Excel, details matter. If you have minor inconsistencies in your data, it can actually cause major problems later on.

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For example, I have a list of salespeople and each one falls into one of four regions:

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North, South, East, or West.

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But, if you look closely, you can see that a couple of the values are a little bit different.

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It looks like North is misspelled, and

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West is also missing an E, and

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believe it or not, these small differences might actually cause us to get the wrong result with certain formulas or pivot tables.

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Now, since we have about 300 salespeople, finding all of the inconsistencies would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

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But I'm going to show you a shortcut that's going to make it a lot easier.

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First, we'll need to apply a filter to the data, and you can get there from the sort and filter command.

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Next, we'll click the filter drop-down arrow for the region column.

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Now this is showing us a list of all of the unique values in this column.

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And what we're going to do now is deselect only the correct values. So we'll deselect East,

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North,

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South, and West;

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So we're only leaving the incorrect values checked.

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then click OK and

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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.

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And now if you click on the filter again you can see that

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we've paired this down to only the four values that we actually want. So now, just select all, and click OK, and now

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we know that all the values in this column are nice and consistent.

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