Microsoft has released a feature that solves one of the most common problems faced by Excel users. The technology company announced a feature that identifies inconsistencies in the data in a table, which could generate errors in a future calculation. To do this, Excel will rely on Copilot’s artificial intelligence.
The technology giant presented Clean Dataa function capable of detect data inconsistencies in an Excel spreadsheet. This feature can identify number formatting issues, text inconsistencies, or extra spaces in cells. With the push of a button, Copilot’s AI will perform an analysis and delete or correct the information.
The function Clean Data in Excel solves a common problem we encounter in workbooks. If you have ever been given a file in which the contents of the cells were not properly formatted, or you simply copied the data from another spreadsheet, it is likely that you have encountered errors when performing a calculation.
While there are functions to change formatting or replace extra characters, these require one or two additional steps. The advantage of Clean Data is that Excel’s AI will identify the content automatically and will alert you to possible inconsistencies. The user will then have the option to delete or replace the erroneous data with a single click.
How Clean Data works in Excel
According to Microsoft, Clean Data can identify text inconsistencies in cells of the same value. For example, if you wrote one word in uppercase and another in lowercase or with punctuation marks. In this case, Excel will show a window in which we can select the incorrect data and replace it.
Clean Data is also capable of detect extra spaces within a cell’s data. This error is quite common when you paste text and you miss a space at the end of the word. In this case, Copilot will suggest removing unnecessary spaces at the beginning, end or between values.
Perhaps the most important of all is the numerical format inconsistency. This function can identify inconsistencies of text and numbers in a columnFor example, when someone adds a “$” symbol to the amount and ends up getting an error in the math operation. In this case, the AI will ask if you want to convert all text cells to numbers and thus avoid problems.
The Clean Data function is located available in the web version of Excelalthough it will later reach desktop applications. Microsoft mentions that this function works best if the data is in table format, although these should not exceed 100 columns or 50,000 rows.
It goes without saying that this and other AI features require a Copilot subscription. Along with data analysis and cleaning, the Excel wizard can also help you perform other tasks, such as generating, explaining, and inserting Python code into your spreadsheets.
