Who asked: Nadia, who runs member services at Granite Loft, a climbing gym.
Why: the gym is moving its member emails to a new tool. The old booking system exported 18 contacts, typed by hand over the years: names as "Last, First" in every mix of capitals and spaces, emails with stray capitals and spaces, phone numbers in five formats (two of them stored as plain numbers), join dates partly as text and partly as real dates, and plan names spelled any which way. Two members are in the list twice.
The data: the Contacts tab, columns A to E, exactly as exported. Columns G to P are laid out for your cleaned version; R2 is for the final count.
What done looks like: clean first and last names, lowercase emails with a check column, 10-digit phones, real dates, consistent plan names, duplicates flagged (the first copy kept), a Status dropdown, and the number of contacts ready to import in R2. Every step is a formula filled down, so the next export can be pasted in and cleaned the same way.
This project closes the Intermediate level with the cleanup work that fills real analyst and admin days. It brings back TRIM, PROPER, LOWER, SEARCH, COUNTIF and data validation, and adds three tools you'll meet properly in the Advanced level: SPLIT, REGEXREPLACE and TO_TEXT. Each step's prompt gives what you need.
Work the steps in order. Each one starts where the last one ended, and later steps read the columns you built earlier. Watch for the traps the brief warns about: names with more than one word, phones stored as numbers, dates that are already dates, and duplicates that only match after cleaning.