Cleansing misspelled data

[Callum Wade]

I have taken control of a very messy safety management system at work. I'm working on creating a dashboard using pivot charts and slicers to make the KPI's easiy visualised without excessive manual input.

The biggest problem I'm having is that in fields such as Cause and Department I'm faced with multiple spellings of the same value. For example in "Cause" I have things like "Struck By", "Struck by", "struck by" "STRUCK BY", "struck_by" etc. I have a list range prepared with standardised causes and departments to use with data validation to ensure this isn't a problem going forward however I need to make sure all the entries are identical so that the pivot tables provide accurate reports.

Can anyone recommend a way of cleansing the data so all the entries follow the new standardised formats that isn't manually scrolling through hundreds of rows?

All options considered as I am wanting to learn VBA as well.

Thanks

 

[mikerickson]

A helper column with a formula like =PROPER(TRIM(A1)) that is then copy/pasted over the original column would fix the capitalization issue.

Quicker than looking and editing each cell.

 

[Akuini]

...."struck_by" etc

There's an underscore in the string, what other Non-Alphanumeric Characters could be there? like .;'/ etc?
Could you post some actual example?