The average CRM export has somewhere between 80 and 150 columns. The average team member needs somewhere between 5 and 15 of them. The gap between what the system exports and what a human needs is where countless hours of manual spreadsheet work disappear every week.
Column management — choosing which columns to keep, what to call them, and what order to put them in — is not a technical skill. It's an operational skill. And it's one that non-technical teams can master with the right tools.
The Column Sprawl Problem
Modern SaaS platforms are generous with their exports. HubSpot contact exports include lifecycle stage history, lead source attribution, and dozens of custom properties that most teams never use. Salesforce opportunity exports include fields that were added years ago and are now blank for 90% of records. The result is exports so wide that the columns you need are buried somewhere between column 40 and column 120.
Sohovi finds gaps, duplicates, and format errors in your CRM data — so your team is working from records they can trust.
This creates two practical problems. First, anyone working with the file has to scroll through irrelevant data to find what they need. Second, when the file is shared with a partner, analyst, or external system, all that irrelevant data comes along — including potentially sensitive internal fields.
Privacy Risk in Full Exports
Many teams don't realise how much private information is hiding in their standard exports. A contact export might include a lead score that you don't want competitors to see, salary information entered by a recruiter, or personal notes from a sales call. Before sharing any CSV externally, check every column for data that should stay internal.
The GDPR principle of data minimisation is relevant here even if you're not in a heavily regulated industry: only share the fields the recipient actually needs for their stated purpose.
Sohovi automatically detects PII in your datasets — emails, phone numbers, SSNs — all processed client-side so your data never leaves the browser.
Building a Column Template for Each Use Case
The most efficient approach is to define a column template for each regular data handoff. When you export for the marketing team every week, the template specifies exactly which 12 columns go in the file and what order they should be in. When you export for the finance team monthly, it's a different template with different columns.
Maintaining these templates means you can run the export, apply the template, and share in minutes rather than manually adjusting the file each time.
A browser-based CSV column picker lets you select, rename, and reorder columns visually, then download the clean file. Sohovi's free CSV Column Picker does exactly this — pick your columns, rename headers, reorder, download. No spreadsheet manipulation required.
Sohovi gives you a full quality report on any spreadsheet in seconds — upload your file and see exactly what needs fixing.
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