Excel Clean Up

[Heather Reetz]

Is there any way to clean up a spreadsheet?  A PDF was converted to Excel, but the cells are a bit weird now.  Some cells act like they are both merged and not merged, see picture.  I was just wondering if there is an easy utility of some kind that I don't know about.

[Steven Strauss]

No utility per se; you need to clean it up one column at a time. First start by deleting all the extra columns that were created that do not really exist, then using the text-to-columns feature (in the data tools group on the data tab), you can separate those columns that mysteriously got merged together.

[Heather Reetz]

Thank you for the suggestion.  It actually ended up working best to delete the extra header rows, then select all and unmerge cells.  Then I just had to delete the sections of columns that were blank, always having it shift left.  That got everything lined up back in the proper columns.  Once I got a rhythm down, it went pretty quickly.

In this particular case, I couldn't delete the columns because they were mixed in.  I don't know how to explain it, but in the above, I ended up deleting, for example cells B1 to B40, but then also C41 to C125.  They were not consistent.