Why this is lazy: It front-loads a tiny bit of effort to eliminate massive headaches and manual work later. It's like spending 5 minutes organizing your desk so you don't spend an hour searching for your keys every day.
When you're faced with an existing, somewhat messy list in a text document or a single spreadsheet column, your lazy best friends are Find and Replace and Text to Columns.
Standardize with Find and Replace:
Look for common variations in phrasing or spacing.
Lazy Move: Replace " - " with "|" or "Product A" with "Product_A". Standardizing brother cell phone list separators or terms makes the next step trivial.
Text to Columns (The Magic Button):
If you've managed to get a consistent delimiter (like a comma, tab, or the pipe | symbol you just added), this feature in Excel or Google Sheets will instantly split your single column of text into multiple structured columns.
Lazy Steps:
Select the column with your messy list.
Go to Data > Text to Columns (Excel) or Data > Split text to columns (Google Sheets).
Choose your delimiter (e.g., "Comma" or "Custom" for |).
Click "Finish." Bam! Instant data.
Why this is lazy: It automates repetitive extraction. Instead of manually cutting and pasting, you're telling the software to do all the heavy lifting based on simple patterns.