Phone Numbers Messy in Your CSV? The Market Stall Texts

2026-10-30

Saturday, 6:15 am. The back of the van is open, the gazebo poles are rattling against the crates, and you are standing in a car park with your phone in one hand and a thermos in the other.

The pottery workshop starts at ten. Twelve people have booked. You wanted to send them a short text: Tomorrow's class is today, wear old clothes, the kiln is warm.

The text tool has just thrown back your list with a red banner. 43 rows could not be imported.

You open the file on the phone and squint. It is a patchwork.

Six ways to write one number

Some numbers start with +49. Some with 0176. One has brackets around the area code. One has a slash in the middle, like your grandmother wrote them. One has a space at the end that you can't see but the tool can.

The names are no better. "ANNA schmidt." "Schmidt, Anna." "anna S." You are fairly sure these are two different people, and fairly sure they are the same one.

The list came from three places: the booking form on your site, the sign-up sheet at the last market, and a spreadsheet your sister started when she helped out in spring. Each one was fine on its own. Together they look like a drawer where someone emptied every pocket.

It is 6:20 now. The market opens at eight.

You do what you always do. You start fixing by hand.

The quiet price of "I'll just fix it quickly"

Here is the part you don't tell anyone. This is not the first time.

Last month it was the newsletter list. Before that, a delivery export where half the postcodes had lost their zero. Each time, you told yourself it was a one-off. Each time it cost an hour, then two. A lunch break. Half a Sunday. Once, a whole evening you had promised to spend with people you like.

And nobody sees it. There is no invoice for it, no line in the books. It is just the tax you pay for working alone: you are the potter, the shopkeeper, the person who answers the phone, and also the person who removes spaces from phone numbers one row at a time.

There is a smaller worry underneath too. What if you send the text to a wrong number? What if "Anna Schmidt" gets two reminders and the other Anna gets none? You wanted this to feel warm and well run. Instead you're crouched behind a van, squinting at row 27.

It makes you feel a little like you're winging it. Not a real business. Just someone with a very nice kiln and a very untidy list.

The pause between two crates

At 6:50 you've fixed eleven numbers. You've also, you realise, introduced a typo in one of them. You stop, put the thermos on a crate, and ask yourself a question you've never quite asked.

Why am I doing this by hand, again, when it's the same mess every time?

The mess isn't random. It's the same few habits repeating: spaces in odd places, capital letters where they shouldn't be, the same person written two ways. A person would spot the pattern in thirty seconds. Which means a small, patient routine could spot it too, and could do it while you drink your tea.

It's not a dramatic thought. It's more like a window opening a crack. It doesn't have to be me and my thumbs, every single time.

You send the class a short message from your own phone, one by one, to the ones you can reach, and the workshop goes ahead. It's fine. It's always fine. But you drive home that afternoon already thinking about next week.

A different Monday

Picture it a few weeks later.

It's Monday, 9:05. The kettle is on. The new sign-ups from the weekend have landed in one file, as messy as ever, because people will always type their number however they like.

But this time you don't open it and sigh. You run it through a small routine you set up once. Before anything is changed, it shows you what it would change. Numbers in one consistent shape. Names tidied. The two Annas flagged for you to look at, because that is a judgement only you can make. A short report lists exactly what happened, so you can trust it rather than hope.

Ten minutes, perhaps less. You look at the report, nod, and move on to glazing.

The Saturday text goes out on Friday afternoon, with a cup of tea beside you, to a list you believe in. Nothing red. No row 27.

What changes isn't only the time. It's the feeling of running something that holds together. The list is just a list again, not a small weekly dread. Your evenings stay your evenings, and your Saturday morning starts with the thermos and the sunrise instead of a spreadsheet and a knot in your stomach.

If that sounded like your car park

If you recognised yourself somewhere in here, in the numbers with slashes, the names in three cases, the hour you keep losing, there is a calmer way to handle it.

Clean Data in Minutes – CSV & Excel Cleaning Toolkit (Python) is built for exactly this kind of mess: duplicates, dates, phone numbers, encoding, splitting and merging files, with a dry-run first and a change report afterwards, so you see what will happen before it happens.

It comes with a 30-day money-back promise: if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

Have a look at the toolkit here

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.