Subsection 1.3
Five dirt patterns at a glance
Reading
You are going to inherit hundreds of rosters in your organizing career. Almost every one of them has the same five problems. Once you can spot them in 60 seconds, the rest of the course is just teaching you the formula for each.
The five patterns below are not a complete list of every spreadsheet sin. They are the five that show up in every union roster the lead organizer has ever handed me.
The five dirt patterns at a glance
| Pattern | What you see | What breaks | Module that fixes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leading and trailing spaces | " Maria Vasquez " | Exact-match lookups fail. | Module 2 · TRIM |
| Hidden line breaks and CHAR(160) | "770-555-0143\nAnna" | Phone column has invisible junk; LEN is wrong. | Module 2 · CLEAN + SUBSTITUTE |
| Concatenated fields | "1247 MLK Jr Dr SW Atlanta GA 30310" | You cannot filter by city or ZIP. | Module 3 · SPLIT / Text to Columns |
| Placeholder values | "(000) -", "N/A", "TBD" | Card-support % inflates by 10–20 points. | Module 4 · IF + ISBLANK + LEN |
| Inherited visual formatting | Five different fill colors and merged headers. | Pivot tables refuse to run; matching breaks. | Module 5 · Paste Values |
Trust your eyes, then verify with LEN
The cell that looks clean might still have a non-breaking space at the end. =LEN(A2) returns the number of characters in the cell. If it is one more than you expect, you have an invisible character to chase.
Action: Mark this page complete when you have finished the activity above.