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Did you know that Google Sheets can automatically clean messy data?

By Gill

Messy data is one of the biggest frustrations for spreadsheet users. If your data is untidy you can’t sort, filter or analyse your data easily. But Google Sheets has built-in tools that can split, tidy, remove duplicates and standardise data in seconds. Most people don’t know these features exist. Simply select the data, click the Data tab, then choose Data clean-up.

Click on Trim whitespace to automatically delete any extra spaces.

Then again, click the Data tab, go to Data clean-up, but this time choose Remove Duplicates. Tick the Data has Header row box (if you have a row of headers at the top of your data). Remove the tick from any columns that you don’t want included (in this example Column A – the Booking ID, as they are all unique).

Then click Remove Duplicates.

Click OK

Published: 13 January 2026
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