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 we'll 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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