You need a clean list before you can continue your main tasks. Imagine if you had someone to take care of the tedious parts of getting a usable list: copy/paste, de-duplicate, merge or extract your lists from a raw data source.
That's exactly what I do. You tell me what you need, send me your raw data as a CSV, TXT or Excel spreadsheet file. I use my specialized tools to clean the data and deliver a file in a format that is suited for your purposes.
The key to completing a data clean-up is knowing which tools will help at each step. I use all of the following tools, sometimes I need to use more than one on a set of raw data:
* Power Query - part of Excel
* Microsoft Access - when I need fast filtering and sorting on huge datasets
* RegexBuddy - a really powerful text processor that uses regular expressions to parse data
* VBA (macros) for smaller datasets that need special Excel-centric handling
* VB.net - custom, ad-hoc programs to help manage files and folders