Use Excel tools to report and analyze data in your software package. This post examines the process of importing a CSV or TXT file.

I’ve been covering the use of Microsoft Access tools to clean your Excel data for the past few weeks. Today is the final entry in that series, and our topic is getting the cleaned data back to Excel. To recap, my premise is this: Microsoft Access has lots of tools that can help you clean up your Excel data. I’ve covered many of them in the last few posts, including the find duplicates query, update queries and several useful functions. Here are links to the other articles in

Use VBA to check for nearly identical data in your Excel worksheet.

Today we’ll be looking at preventing duplicate values from being entered into your Excel sheet. This is the final entry in a series that looked at several ways to ensure that data being entered into your Excel sheet is valid. In this case, we’re going to use a custom validation rule, which we’ve already seen briefly when validating phone numbers. We’ll combine that with the “CountIf” function, so let’s start with a quick overview of that one. The CountIf function allows you t

Use MS Access to find duplicates in your Excel data

In recent posts, I’ve been talking about validating your Excel data using VBA. I talked about creating a validation harness, which you can leverage to validate any Excel data. Then I covered some phone number validations you might add to that harness. Today I’m going to talk about using that harness to automatically replace text that a user may enter. I consider this part of data validation, because you can use it to head off data issues. Here’s an example: Converting "K" to

Use Excel's Data Validation feature, in conjunction with Excel functions, to validate numeric data.

Use MS Access to clean numeric fields that contain text.