5 Data Entry Tips to Speed Up Data Cleansing in Excel

Do you find data cleansing really boring?

Frequent dealing with error in data for long hours can piss you off. You don’t like to face off those flaws anymore. But, what would you do to your commitment with the firm assigning data entry in the UK or elsewhere? Would you like to credit some more hours or days to accomplish those records?

Why don’t you try some data entry tips to speed up data cleansing in the Excel data sheet?
I bet your data won’t suffer from discrepancies. Here is a rundown of a few Excel data entry tips to carry on while you cleanse a huge set of data.

1. Finding and Replacing:

Do you scroll up and down or move cursor to and fro to spot the errors?

You don’t need to do so because you have the Find and Replace function. It can automate searching and then replacing the intended data. You can change numbers, text, zeros, references in formulas and change formatting also.

How can you find and replace in Excel?

• Select the cells where you want to find and replace.
• Go to the Home menu.
• Select Find and Select option.
• A dialog box will pop up.
• Input what you want to find in ‘Find What’ field.
• What you need to replace with, insert that value in the field next to ‘Replace With’ in that dialog box.
• If you want to find and replace all, hit the Find All and Replace All buttons.

2. Treating all blanks:

Blanks are fearsome-this is what I realised while creating reports and dashboards. If you think that you can manually do, it’s absolutely true. You can do. But, how long will you do it while cleansing millions of datasets?

Save your precious time. Select all blanks altogether. And, fill them with certain value.
Try these steps to select blanks:

• Select the data wherein you want to spot the blanks.
• Press F5 key.
• A dialog box will pop up.
• Hit ‘Special’ tab at the bottom.
• Choose ‘Blanks’ to select.
• Hit ‘Ok’ tab.

Fill blanks with a value:

• After selecting all blanks, type whatsoever you want to fill them with, like 0.
• Press Ctrl+Enter.

These steps will insert the same value in all blanks within a wink.

3. Converting copied number as text into numbers:

Did you press an apostrophe or any other character while entering the numeric data?
I, often, make such a silly mistake. But, this mistake can lead to a blunder in the master report. Your calculations may show errors. So, what you all need to do is:

• Type 1 in a blank cell in the excel sheet.
• Select it.
• Press Ctrl+C to copy it.
• Now, select the range in your database.
• Press Alt+E+S to open ‘Paste Special’ option.
• Its dialog box will appear. Hit the radio button of ‘Multiply’ under Operation.
• Press ‘Ok’ to convert all the copied numbers as a text into numbers again.

4. De-duplication:

Clones, often, breed confusion. The duplicate data lead to wrong calculations. The duplicates should be rectified with intensive caution. Let’s have a look over how to highlight duplicate data entry and then, delete it in a jiffy:
Steps to highlight duplicate data:

• Select the range or data.
• Go to the Home menu.
• Select ‘Conditional Formatting’ from there.
• Now, choose the subset -‘Highlight Cells Rules’ and then, ‘Duplicate Values’.
• Specify the formatting to highlight duplicate entries.

Steps to delete duplicate entries:

• Of course, you have to select the range.
• Move the cursor to the Data menu.
• Select ‘Delete Duplicates’ option.
• A dialog box will emerge.
• Select the columns or rows where you want to remove duplicates from.
• Press ‘Ok’.

5. Spell check:

If you reality want to maintain the credibility of your work, never let your client point at the typo errors. You can check the spelling through Google. Or, you can:

• Press F7 key to determine the misspelt words.