Use Sheets smart clean-up to prepare your data for analysis

Use smart clean-up features such as 'Clean-up suggestions' and 'Column stats' to organise, standardise and clean raw data before you analyse.

Clean-up suggestions

Use Clean-up suggestions to help identify common errors that you might want to take action on: removing extra spaces and duplicates, adding number formatting, identifying anomalies or fixing inconsistent data. 

1. On  your computer, open a spreadsheet in Google Sheets 

• At the top, click Data  Data clean-up  Cleanup suggestions. 
• If you import data into a sheet and suggestions are detected, a data clean-up notification will appear in the bottom right > click See all.

2. Clean-up suggestions will appear in the sidebar.

• When the sidebar is open, click  on each column to view detected suggestions. 
• When you scroll over a suggestion, the related cells are highlighted in your spreadsheet. 

Tip: anomalies or errors appear in red while other suggestions are in green.

Use Column stats

Use Column stats to view insights about the values within a column, so you can identify problems or quickly get a sense of what your data looks like. You can view visualisations (count and distribution), frequency tables (to quickly view the most and least frequently occurring values) and summary statistics at the column level.

1. On your computer, open a spreadsheet in Google Sheets 

• At the top, click Data > Column stats and review the stats in the sidebar. 
• If you import data into a sheet and suggestions are detected, a data clean-up notification will appear in the bottom right > click See all. Once you’ve reviewed your suggestions, click Review column stats. 

2. At the top of the sidebar, use the arrows < > to switch between columns.