Data cleaning tool

File Surgeon

Clean messy data files on your desktop — without a data-warehouse project or a specialist platform.

Data prep that stays on your machine

File Surgeon is a Windows application for cleaning, standardizing, and exporting data files. It is for analysts, researchers, and operations people who inherit CSVs and spreadsheets that are almost usable — encoding issues, inconsistent dates, duplicate rows, headers that don’t match — and need them fixed before anything else can happen.

You should not have to buy an enterprise data platform to make a file trustworthy. File Surgeon is the practical middle ground: a focused tool you run locally, with preview, logging, and batch processing.

How it works

  1. Open your files CSV, Excel, JSON, SPSS, SAS, and related formats. Batch processing is available when you have more than one.
  2. Choose the cleaning work Headers, dates, numbers, encoding, whitespace, case, duplicates, empty rows and columns, missing values.
  3. Preview before you commit See what will change, watch progress, and keep a log if something needs a second look.
  4. Export what you need CSV, Excel, JSON, or PDF, with delimiters and naming you control.

What you get

  • Support for CSV, Excel, JSON, SPSS, SAS, and text files
  • Column and header standardization, including encoding fixes
  • Date and number normalization, duplicate removal, empty row/column handling
  • Batch processing for multiple files
  • Runs on Windows 10 or later