How I Built an Automated Data-Cleaning Pipeline with n8n (So I Never Touch Messy Spreadsheets Again)

Description and use

An n8n workflow automates cleaning of Google Form data, normalizing names, emails, phone numbers, dates, assigning unique IDs, and outputting a clean Excel file and summary report, eliminating manual cleanup.

Problem

Manual cleanup of Google Form submissions becomes tedious due to inconsistent names, duplicate emails, malformed phone numbers, and varied date formats.

Outcome

The pipeline eliminates weekly manual cleanup, reduces errors from duplicates or typos, provides instant summary reports, and scales from 10 to 10,000 submissions without additional effort.

Workflow

• Trigger on new Google Form submission
• Pull raw row into Code node
• Normalize name to title case
• Validate and deduplicate email
• Normalize phone number to 01XXXXXXXXX
• Convert date to YYYY-MM-DD
• Generate unique Customer ID
• Split output to clean master file and summary report
• Write clean data to Excel
• Send summary report

Evidence

A raw form submissions sheet usually looks something like this: ...

Source

A form submission triggers the workflow, pulls in the raw row, runs it through a Code node that handles all the normalization logic...

Source