Excel is the default data quality tool for most small businesses. It's already there, people know how to use it, and it handles a lot of the basics. But there are real limits — and hitting them is expensive in time and errors.
What Excel Does Well
Finding duplicates: Conditional formatting with "Highlight Cell Rules > Duplicate Values" or COUNTIF formulas identify exact duplicates quickly. Effective for small lists.
Checking completeness: COUNTBLANK counts empty cells per column. A quick scan shows which fields are mostly populated and which are mostly empty.
Sohovi profiles every column in your dataset for completeness and flags the exact rows where values are missing — free to try.
Basic format validation: Data Validation rules can restrict a column to certain values, date formats, or numeric ranges. Useful for future data entry, less useful for auditing existing data.
Sorting for spot-checks: Sort a column and inspect the top and bottom values to spot obvious outliers, system defaults (01/01/1900), and format inconsistencies.
Simple deduplication: Remove Duplicates eliminates exact duplicate rows. Works well for small, clean files.
Sohovi automatically finds every duplicate in your dataset — including near-matches — and shows you exactly which rows are affected.
Where Excel Falls Short
Performance at scale: Files with more than 50,000–100,000 rows become slow or crash Excel. Formulas that run fine on 5,000 rows hang on 500,000.
No automated profiling: Excel doesn't automatically tell you that column A is 67% complete and column B has 300 format variants. You have to check each column manually with the right formula.
No pattern detection: Excel can't detect that your phone column has 12 different format patterns. You'd need to write complex formulas for each one.
No PII detection: Excel won't flag that a column appears to contain social security numbers or that a free-text field contains email addresses.
Sohovi automatically detects PII in your datasets — emails, phone numbers, SSNs — all processed client-side so your data never leaves the browser.
No version history on data quality: Excel doesn't track whether your data quality is improving or declining over time without manual record-keeping.
The Excel + Profiling Tool Combination
For most small businesses, the right answer isn't "only Excel" or "replace Excel." It's Excel for the things Excel does well (data manipulation, simple cleanup, formulas) combined with a profiling tool for systematic quality assessment.
Sohovi profiles what Excel can't automatically — completeness rates, format patterns, PII detection, value distributions — in seconds. You get the assessment in Sohovi, then do the cleanup work in Excel.
Use the right tool for each task, and don't expect Excel to do things it was never designed for.
