| Check a CSV’s delimiter, row count and headers before Excel touches it, stack a folder of exports with one header row, and see which IDs are in both lists. |
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You know the drill. Somebody from leadership stops by: “Quick question, can you just pull the numbers on…?” Sure. How hard can it be? Then the real work starts. The export is pipe-delimited for some reason. There are twelve monthly files, each with its own header row. Phone numbers are typed nine different ways. Half the data is locked in a PDF. And you need to know which customer IDs are in this list but not last month’s. None of that is analysis. It’s data janitor work, and it eats the hours you should be spending on the insight (or your real project, remember that one?). Sound familiar? ❓ Here’s the thing: Excel, Power BI and Tableau aren’t the problem. It’s all the little prep you do around them, by hand, on every ad hoc request. That’s exactly the kind of work a computer should be doing for you. So below are the tools I’d hand any analyst or researcher, most helpful first. Some run on your Windows PC, some run right in your browser. None of them need you to write code. Click Learn more or Try it on any one for the full rundown. Now on with the show… 😃 |
| Flat Files: CSV Prep Before Excel Touches It 🗂️ |
Every ad hoc request starts the same way: somebody’s export, in some format, with some surprise inside. |
| Tool | What it does for you | Rows and Headers
Learn more → | Pick a CSV or TXT and it tells you the delimiter (comma, tab, pipe, semicolon), the row count, the column count and the header names. Know what you’re dealing with before Excel “helpfully” reformats your ZIP codes. | Append Text Files
Learn more → | Twelve monthly exports with the same columns? Select them all and get ONE file with the header row only once. No deleting eleven header rows by hand, no missing a month. | Compare Lists
Learn more → | Two lists of customer IDs, SKUs or emails? See what’s in both, what’s only in the first and what’s only in the second. Perfect for “why doesn’t this match last month’s pull?” | Randomize List
Learn more → | Shuffle a big file and split it into as many random groups as you want, header row kept on every piece. Quick control and test groups, or a random sample to QA by hand. (It’s a simple random split, not stratified.) | Phone Standardizer
Learn more → | Phone numbers typed every which way? This RegEx-based cleaner standardizes them into one format so your joins and dedupes actually match. | XML Merger
Learn more → | Several XML files with the same structure from the same system? Merge them into one file before you load it. | Add Thousands Delimiter
Learn more → | Adds comma separators to numbers, so the figure you paste into the stakeholder email reads 1,248,300 instead of 1248300. |
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| Tip: New export lands? Run Rows and Headers first and write down the delimiter and row count. Stack it with Append Text Files if it’s one of a set. When the VP asks “is this all of it?”, you’ve got the answer on a sticky note. 😊 |
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| PDFs, Reports and AI: Get the Data Out Safely 📄 |
Some of your data shows up as a PDF, a screenshot or a recorded meeting. And some of it should never be pasted into a chatbot as-is. |
| Tool | What it does for you | MarkItDown
Learn more →
Browser version → | That report you got as a PDF (or a Word doc, Excel file or deck)? Drag it in and get clean Markdown text, ready to read, search or hand to your AI tool using far fewer tokens. | Personal Info Scrubber
Try it → | Strip names, card numbers and emails out of text before you paste it into ChatGPT or send it to a vendor. (A helper, not a compliance program. Check your org’s data policy.) | OCR and Translation with AI
Learn more → | Numbers stuck in a screenshot or a scanned table? Pull the text out with AI, and translate it if the source isn’t in English. | SearchOnConcept
Learn more → | Ask your pile of methodology docs, vendor reports and recorded meetings a plain-English question and jump to the exact page or timestamp. It finds the idea even when the wording is different. Runs on your own machine. | URL Memory
Learn more → | Collects every link you copy while hunting for data sources, de-duplicated and cleaned up, ready to paste into your notes or the methods section. | FlexiFinder
Learn more → | Search several sites for the same term at once (a government data portal, Stack Overflow, your vendor’s docs) using Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. |
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| Shortcut Sheets for the Tools You Live In ⌨️ |
Each one is a sortable, filterable sheet of the program’s built-in keyboard shortcuts. Filter to the ten you’ll actually use and tape them next to your monitor. |
| Tool | What it does for you | 393 Excel Hotkeys
Learn more → | Excel has more built-in shortcuts than anybody remembers. Here are 393 of them in one sheet. Less mouse, more model. | Power BI Hotkeys
Learn more → | Built-in keyboard shortcuts for Power BI. Fewer clicks building and tweaking the visuals in your report. | Tableau Hotkeys
Learn more → | Built-in keyboard shortcuts for Tableau, for the analyst who’s tired of dragging everything. | SPSS Hotkeys
Learn more → | Built-in keyboard shortcuts for SPSS. Handy when you spend the whole day in SPSS cleaning survey data. | Google Sheets Hotkeys
Learn more → | Built-in keyboard shortcuts for Google Sheets, for the shared workbooks everybody on the team edits. | Google Analytics Hotkeys
Learn more → | Built-in keyboard shortcuts for Google Analytics. Less clicking around the dashboard when marketing asks for “just the traffic numbers.” |
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| The Multi-Monitor Desk 🖥️ |
Six workbooks, two monitors, one Teams chat blinking. These keep the right window where you need it. |
| Tool | What it does for you | Active Toggler
Learn more → | Six Excel workbooks open? Press one hotkey to cycle through every open window of that program (or start it if it isn’t running). No more hunting through the taskbar. | Always on Top
Learn more → | Pin the data dictionary or the stakeholder’s email on top with a hotkey while you build the query underneath it. Toggle it off when you’re done. | Toggle Between Monitors
Learn more → | Throw the active window to your other monitor with a hotkey instead of dragging it across. | Tracking Time
Learn more → | Tracks which programs you were in and for how long. Finally, an answer to “where did Tuesday go?” when your manager asks why the real project slipped. |
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One thing I’ve learned: you don’t need to automate your whole pipeline this week. Pick ONE prep step on this list that you do on every request. Fix that. Then pick the next one. Twenty minutes back on every ad hoc pull adds up fast. That’s more time for the actual analysis, for your real project, and for getting home on time. That’s the real FREEDOM. How about you? What’s the one data-janitor chore you’d love to never do by hand again? Drop me a note and tell me. I read every one. |
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