Clean text without damaging identifiers
Whitespace is often accidental. Leading zeroes, case, and internal spacing can be meaningful. Apply each rule to the right columns.
Separate identifiers from display text
A customer ID such as 0017 is a string even when it looks numeric. Rowlane parses every cell as text and keeps that representation through cleaning. A spreadsheet program may still reinterpret it when you reopen a CSV; choose a text column type in that program’s import dialog. CSV files do not carry spreadsheet cell types.
Try a rule on a small example
For a name containing two spaces at each edge and three spaces between Avery and Lane, trimming removes only the edges. Collapsing spaces produces Avery Lane. Select the name column to leave identifiers and notes untouched. A quoted note with a newline keeps that newline because the collapse rule only targets ordinary spaces and tabs.
Keep case conversion deliberate
Lowercasing may be helpful for a deliberately case-insensitive category, but it is a bad default for passwords, tokens, or identifiers whose source treats case as significant. Unicode uppercasing can change the number of characters. Review the exact before-and-after values instead of assuming every change is cosmetic.
Export the table and the evidence
Read the proposed table, then download both the cleaned CSV and change log. The log identifies the original record and column for each changed cell. Removing blank records is a separate option and checks the complete record. If the result looks wrong, change the rules and run again against the unchanged input.