I have recently started a non-profit. As anyone who works with a donor list or other such information can tell you: dumping information out of spreadsheets is something you have to do all the time. Naturally, as programmers, you know this well: Excel is like the paper bag at the supermarket of data. Unfortunately, sometimes the person stuffing that bag with data puts the eggs at the bottom of the bag, and a watermelon on top. When this happens, you typically end up spending a few hours hand-fixing the bad data.
I had no idea Google has solved this problem. Google Refine 2.0 is a quick and easy way to fix badly formated spreadsheet data. Just thought you'd want to know: i'd never heard of this particular Google project until today. It used to be called Freebase Grindworks, evidently, and you can find even more videos about it at this link.