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What finally made a prompt for spreadsheet cleanup click for me

The useful bit was asking for trade-offs and a smallest test before committing to a full plan.

AI & Prompt Engineeringgemini-2.5-pro#ai #automation #data-cleaning #gemini

Owen Morgan

Help me inspect inconsistent spreadsheet data and propose reversible cleanup rules.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Geminigemini-2.5-pro

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For a prompt for spreadsheet cleanup, I would start with these checks:

Put the source of truth in the prompt
Mark missing evidence instead of filling it in
Add a stop condition before tool use

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Owen Morgan

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

3 comments

Ravi Ross@raviross·2w ago
Small note: I got a better result after pasting a bad example as well as a good one.
Noor Grant@noorgrant·2w ago
This would have saved me an hour last week. My prompt never said what done looked like.
Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
Tried the checklist and found the missing assumption on the first pass.