Excel Project · Beginner · 2 to 3 hours · VIP
Rescue a candle shop's merged multi-platform orders file
Three platform exports pasted into one spreadsheet: duplicates, stray headers, three date formats, peso signs stored as text, and payment labels typed six ways. Untangle it all.
The brief
Dalisay Home Scents sells candles and room sprays on TikTok Shop, Shopee, and a Facebook Page. The owner's VA merged the three Q2 exports into a single file for a sales report, and the merge brought every platform's quirks along: TikTok dates look like 2026-05-04, Shopee dates like 05/04/2026, Facebook dates like May 4 2026. Shopee exported totals as text with peso signs. Payment methods were typed freely (GCash, gcash, G-Cash, PayMaya, Cash on Delivery). A chunk of rows got pasted twice, the file headers appear again in the middle of the data, some names came through garbled (Pena became Peña), and a few quantities are plainly impossible. The owner wants one number she can trust before doubling her ad budget. This is the single most common task in real analytics work: making a merged file mean something.
Your role
You are the analyst the owner hired for a cleanup-and-report engagement. Deliverable: a clean orders sheet, a quarantine list, and the Q2 numbers she can act on.
The dataset
Q2 2026 orders from three platforms, merged by a VA, intentionally messy
shop-orders-merged.csv · 378 rows
Columns: order_id, order_date, platform, customer_name, customer_phone, city, product, qty, unit_price, total, payment_method, delivery_fee
Setup
- Download shop-orders-merged.csv and open it in Excel or Google Sheets.
- Save a working copy so the raw file stays untouched, the same discipline analysts follow at work.
- Add a cleaning_log tab and record every fix with a count as you go; the log is part of the deliverable.
VIP project
The full brief for this Excel project is for VIP members
The first Excel project is free for every member. The dataset, the tasks, the answer key, and the graded skills check for this one are part of the VIP tier, along with the other 8 locked projects. 5 projects stay free, one for each tool, so you can try every tool before you decide.
VIP access comes with the bootcamp. Enroll once, and every locked project opens, alongside the live sessions, the replays, and the certificate.
Work like an AI-powered analyst
The modern analyst uses AI as a thinking partner, not a shortcut that skips the learning. Try these on this project.
- Paste 15 sample rows into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to list every data-quality issue it can spot, then compare against your own list before cleaning.
- Ask the AI for a SUBSTITUTE formula chain that strips the peso sign and comma from a text amount, then have it explain each step.
- Describe your quarantine rule to the AI and ask it to argue when quarantining beats deleting, and when it does not.
Finished it? Put it in your portfolio.
This is exactly the kind of output the bootcamp builds with you live, with mentor feedback and an AI badge and certificate of completion at the end.