Create formulas, labels, and data-cleaning ideas
Unit ID: AIT-M08-U02 Estimated active time: 15-20 minutes
The main idea
AI can suggest formulas and cleaning steps, but you must test them.
A suggested formula is a hypothesis about your data's shape. It is often right and it has not been run against your columns.
Why this matters
A wrong formula produces numbers rather than errors, and numbers get copied into reports without anyone asking where they came from.
Safe example
A tool suggests a formula for completion rate from completed and total columns.
The formula is correct in general and wrong here, because "total" includes withdrawals.
Better working habit
Ask for formula logic and a small example calculation.
Give it four made-up rows and ask for the answer by hand. If the worked example is wrong, so is the formula.
What to watch for
Do not paste sensitive spreadsheets into unapproved tools.
Spreadsheets carry far more than the columns you are asking about — hidden sheets, comments, and personal detail in rows you are not looking at.
Mini practice
Ask for a formula using safe column names and verify it manually.
Check it against four rows you can compute yourself before running it on the real file.
Check yourself
Before moving on, answer:
- Have I tested this formula on rows I can check by hand?
- Does it match how my columns are actually defined?
- Was this file safe to share, including the parts I am not using?