Spreadsheet cleaner

The defects that actually cost you time

A spreadsheet rarely looks broken. It looks fine, and then SUM returns a number that is obviously too small, or a VLOOKUP misses rows that are visibly right there. Both have the same handful of causes, and all of them are invisible on screen.

Numbers stored as text are the big one. A column exported from a CRM or a bank often arrives as strings — "1,240.00" rather than 1240. Excel will not sum them, and the only visual clue is that they sit on the left of the cell instead of the right. SuperSheet detects these per column and converts them.

Stray whitespace is the other. A trailing space in "North " makes it a different value from "North", which silently splits your groupings and breaks exact-match lookups. The cleaner reports how many cells are affected and trims them.

You see the diagnosis first

Every repair is listed with a count before it runs: how many columns hold text-numbers, how many cells have stray spaces, how many headers would be re-cased. That list is the point — even if you never press apply, you now know what is wrong with the file.

After the repairs, the same pass applies the formatting that makes the sheet readable: a totals row with live formulas, real number formats, a frozen header, and column widths that fit their contents. The full checklist of what to look for is in the messy spreadsheet checklist.

What it will not do

It will not un-merge merged cells or split two tables sharing one tab — those need a decision only you can make, and guessing badly is worse than leaving them. If a sheet has that shape, the cleaner formats what it can read and leaves the rest alone rather than mangling it.