If you rebuild the same cleanup every month, formulas are the wrong tool. Here is the point where Power Query starts paying for itself.
Formulas are excellent for calculation. They are a poor place to store a repeatable cleanup process, because the process lives scattered across helper columns that someone eventually deletes.
The signal to switch
- You receive the same export shape on a schedule.
- You do more than three cleanup steps before you can analyse anything.
- You combine several files or sheets with the same structure.
- You copy last month's workbook and paste new data into it.
The steps that save the most time
- Promote headers and set correct data types once, at the source.
- Remove unused columns early so refreshes stay fast.
- Split, trim and standardise text columns as query steps.
- Unpivot wide monthly columns into a clean tall structure.
- Append files from a folder instead of copying sheets together.
- Merge lookup tables at the query stage instead of with formulas.
The result is a refresh button. Next month you replace the file and the entire cleanup replays, in the same order, with no manual steps to forget.
Power Query is part of the Advanced Excel module in both TRAINTECH memberships, taught on real multi-file datasets.