About WorkPilot

About WorkPilot

WorkPilot brings together practical data services and spreadsheet tools to help businesses improve the quality, integration and usefulness of their information.

Our service areas include data cleaning, ETL and database development, Excel automation, Power BI and reporting. The WorkPilot application supports this work by helping people identify and investigate spreadsheet problems.

Its aim is to highlight meaningful findings, explain why they were identified and avoid treating ordinary blanks or legitimate patterns as errors. WorkPilot is a decision-support tool: findings warrant review rather than automatically proving a spreadsheet is incorrect.

About the WorkPilot application

Spreadsheet analysis

Analyse individual worksheets or entire workbooks. WorkPilot can check for:

  • Duplicate records and duplicate values in user-selected unique columns.
  • Inconsistent data types, suspicious gaps and blank rows within data regions.
  • Leading or trailing whitespace, inconsistent capitalisation and invalid email patterns.
  • Formula errors, unusual formula patterns, suspicious SUM ranges and calculations stored as text.
  • Hidden rows and columns, merged cells and differences between worksheet structures.

Checks are context-dependent and may not apply to every spreadsheet.

Clear findings and reports

WorkPilot presents findings with a severity level, worksheet and cell reference, original value, suggested action and an explanation when available.

Users can review and ignore findings they determine are not relevant. Excel and PDF analysis reports are available for documentation and sharing.

The reports support internal quality checks; they are not certifications, audits or guarantees that a workbook is error-free.

VBA and macro inspection

For macro-enabled workbooks, WorkPilot can identify the presence of a VBA project and indicators of automatic execution, command launching, network access, file operations, registry access and hard-coded paths.

Macro indicators call for investigation; they do not establish malicious intent. WorkPilot does not execute macros as part of inspection.

This is preliminary indicator-based inspection, not a full VBA security audit or malware scan.

Optional improvements

WorkPilot offers selected, user-controlled corrections in a separate workbook copy, and a Formula Modernisation feature for supported lookup patterns.

VLOOKUP-to-XLOOKUP conversion is supported for certain exact-match formulas. HLOOKUP-to-XLOOKUP conversion is being tested. Other modernisation types remain review-only until implemented and verified.

Formula replacements can change behaviour and should always be checked against the original results.

File formats and how WorkPilot operates

WorkPilot supports analysis of .xlsx, legacy .xls, macro-enabled .xlsm and .csv files, with some correction and modernisation operations restricted to .xlsx workbooks.

The Windows desktop edition runs the application engine locally on your computer. The web-hosted edition runs on a server, so its data handling depends on the deployment. WorkPilot is designed to preserve the source workbook when producing reports or corrected copies.

Current scope and future direction

WorkPilot is under active development. Report generation, expanded formula modernisation and Windows packaging continue to be tested. Planned features include broader formula support, performance suggestions and an optional spreadsheet-to-database tool.

WorkPilot's guiding principle: accurate, useful explanations are more valuable than a long list of questionable warnings.

Analyse a spreadsheet