Sometimes while collecting mass amounts data, you've had your hands full getting all the information you need to answer your research question. This can mean you put off making sure the data has been stripped down to only the aspects of it that you need or that it's organized in such a way that it will be easy to use in whatever analysis program fits your needs.
Then when you get past the information gathering stage, you wonder how you'll ever check through every line of a text file to get rid of extra data, or every line of a spreadsheet to make sure that your data is consistently categorized. Fortunately, there are some tools you can use to automate the work of cleaning and organizing your data.
I'll be working with a PC but Google Sheets which I work with a lot in this works on both PCs and Macs. The text-editing program that I use, Notepad++ is not available for Macs but Atom and Brackets perform similar functions.