How to Clean Excel Data: Remove Duplicates, Spaces and Empty Rows

By the DocEpic team · Updated 10 November 2026 · 2 min read

Data from forms, exports and colleagues is rarely tidy: the same customer listed twice, names with stray spaces that break VLOOKUP, blank rows in the middle, columns nobody needs. Fixing it by hand in Excel is slow and easy to get wrong. These tools do each clean-up in one step, show a preview before you download, and never change your numbers and dates.

Tidy spaces, empty rows and letter case

Clean Spreadsheet fixes the problems that make data look the same but compare differently.

1. Open Clean Spreadsheet and add your Excel or CSV file.
2. Tick what to fix: remove empty rows and columns, trim spaces at the start and end, turn double spaces into one, and remove invisible characters that often come from copying out of websites and PDFs.
3. Optionally change the letter case of text to Title Case, UPPERCASE or lowercase.
4. Check the preview and download the cleaned file.

Only text is changed: numbers and dates stay exactly as they are.

Remove duplicate rows

Remove Duplicates drops repeated rows. Choose the columns to compare — for example just Email or Phone, so the same person entered twice with a different spelling of their name still counts as a duplicate — or none, so rows must match in every column. Keep the first or last copy, or keep only the duplicates to see what was repeated. Tick Ignore upper/lower case and Ignore extra spaces to catch near-duplicates too.

It is worth running Clean Spreadsheet first: stray spaces and invisible characters are the most common reason two identical-looking rows aren't treated as duplicates.

Keep only the columns you need

Exports often have dozens of columns when you need five. Select & Reorder Columns lets you click columns to keep or drop them and drag them into the order you want — handy before sharing a file, or before importing it into another system that expects a fixed column order.

Find what changed between two versions

When a colleague sends back an updated list, Compare Excel Sheets shows exactly what is different: added, removed and changed rows and cells, colour-coded, with an Excel report to download. Columns are matched by their headings, and rows by a key column such as an ID or email, by smart matching that finds inserted and deleted rows, or simply by position.

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