OpenRefine

OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a desktop application for working with messy data. It excels at tasks that are painful in Excel: normalising inconsistent spellings (Bangalore/Bengaluru/Bangaluru → one value), splitting multi-valued columns, clustering similar text, parsing dates in a dozen formats, and reconciling names against external databases (Wikidata, VIAF). For Indian researchers, OpenRefine is particularly valuable for cleaning government datasets — district names that don’t match across ministries, scheme names with variant spellings, caste categories that changed between census rounds. It also supports GREL (General Refine Expression Language) for advanced transformations. Free, open-source, runs locally on your machine.