See my Excel Work Collection also on Guru.com at following URL https://www.guru.com/portfolio/excel/851682 or click the image at the bottom of this page. I have many years of experience of acquiring, combining, massaging and verifying large amounts of data. The electronic tools I use and processes result in accurate, fast results. Excel is often the best tool for projects involving data that can fit and work within its number of rows and columns limits, and memory of the computer. Excel has so much functionality built into it that it can do many things like compare, calculate, summarize, create graphs and other charts and prepare for export in many formats. Excel has so much functionality that I doubt anyone knows all of its capabilities at a detailed level. But with its online help and what's available on the internet, any specific function can be learned and used, if you have the knack like me. If Excel can't do what is needed, I use other tools: Visual Basic programming, Access, TextPipe Pro, Adobe Acrobat, Hypersnap, scripts I write, etc. to ensure data is entered and used correctly. My accounting training has taught me when and where to perform quality assurance on the data during the process. Often, data cleansing and standardization must occur before data is actually used. For example, there are many ways to spell and abbreviate STREET and AVENUE, but if trying to count houses by whether they are on a STREET, AVENUE, ROAD, etc. you would need to standardize the spellings first. Excel makes it easy to change all occurrences of St. to STREET. Before changing any data, you should keep a copy of the source data so you can get back to it if there is ever a question about it, Excel makes this easy to do by easily allowing copying entire tabs of data into other tabs or just entering changed data into another column. And so on ........