Data preparation tools for people who start in Excel

The tools, briefly

Checked September 30, 2026 on each vendor's own pricing and download pages. Prices change; confirm before you buy.

How to choose

You live in Excel on Windows

Start with Power Query. It is already paid for, it records every step, and "Refresh" reruns them on new data. Its weak spots are the ones you meet later: a renamed column stops the refresh with an error you trace back through the steps, and explaining last month's numbers means keeping last month's workbook.

You live in Excel on a Mac

Power Query exists on the Mac now, but with fewer sources — no PDF, and SQL Server is the only database. What works and what doesn't is on its own page.

You clean one messy dataset at a time

OpenRefine. Its clustering of near-duplicate spellings is the best free tool for that job, and its history of operations can be reapplied to the next file of the same shape.

You are an analyst who will build dozens of flows

KNIME if cost matters, Alteryx if the organization already standardized on it, Tableau Prep if the output goes to Tableau. These are general-purpose: many node types, many connectors, and a learning curve to match.

You do the same file work every month

This is where general-purpose tools feel heavy. The work is not "any transformation" — it is the same three exports, matched and summed the same way, checked for what's new or missing, and handed to the same person. TableDI 2 is a desktop app for file work you redo every period: it keeps your sources, rules and delivery as a job, so next month you drop in the new files and run it again. Everything runs on your own machine.

What TableDI 2 does and doesn't do

A job's rules are a fixed set of steps in a fixed order: import mapping (which column becomes which), clean (drop repeats, pad with leading zeros, trim spaces, one date format, read as a number), match on a key, compare amounts within a tolerance, summarize (total, count, smallest, largest, average), computed columns, and delivery. A merge job combines several sheets into one, matching columns by name. Before each period runs, a preflight shows renamed or missing columns, duplicate or blank keys and how the row count moved. Rows the job can't decide by itself wait for you with the file and row they came from.

It is not a general data preparation platform. There is no canvas of nodes, no scripting, no database or cloud connectors, no scheduling server, no charts. If you need those, the tools above are the honest answer. If you need the same monthly job to run the same way and tell you what changed, it is the shorter path.

What it costs

Free has no time limit and no account: unlimited one-off tasks, export with no row limit, and one saved job you rerun every period. The lifetime edition is $99 once for one machine (movable) — or $49 for a year or $7.99 for a month, neither of which renews by itself; it adds more jobs, rules made from exceptions, carrying items to the next period, delivery templates and the history of every period.