DESKPLAIN SPREADSHEET CLEANUP LAB

Open spreadsheet-cleanup-lab.xlsx and begin with StartHere. Save a working copy before editing.

The workbook contains 100 fictional support ticket export rows, 90 distinct IDs and twelve exercises. All names, tickets, minutes and charges are invented. Six extra rows are complete repeats. Four other extra rows disagree with an existing ID and deliberately have no automatic winner.

RawData is the source; keep it unchanged. Practice is a separate editable copy with worked formulas and amber decision/notes cells. Exercises has amber numeric answer cells. AnswerKey shows live worked answers beside fixed original controls. ChecksDashboard highlights row-level problems; its issue groups overlap and must not be added to estimate deletions. ReferenceLookups lists category mappings and function references.

VERSION NOTES
Worked formulas use familiar scalar Excel functions, including COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, TRIM, VLOOKUP and DATE. They do not require XLOOKUP, UNIQUE, macros, sign-in or external connections. XLOOKUP is not available in Excel 2016/2019. English examples use comma separators; local Excel settings may display different separators. Artifact Tool calculations and saved caches were verified; native Microsoft Excel application behavior has not been independently tested.

DATE SAFETY
Practice X contains a parsed candidate, not an automatically approved date. Use Y to reject invalid dates that DATE normalizes. Ambiguous dates have no declared day/month order. Stop and request the source definition rather than guessing.

OPTIONAL CSV
The secondary CSV contains the same 100 rows and eleven source fields without the artificial Import row column. It is UTF-8 with a BOM, quoted fields and CRLF line endings. For Excel, use Data > From Text/CSV and import Created raw text as Text so automatic date conversion does not erase the intended exercise issues. The CSV does not contain the workbook formulas, formatting or answer key.

LIMITS
TRIM covers ordinary spaces. The fixture has no nonbreaking spaces, wildcard characters or tilde separators in its source values. COUNTIF(S) matching is case-insensitive. These choices are documented teaching assumptions, not a universal deduplication algorithm or a business deletion policy.
