RowBot: When Your Spreadsheet Turned into Your Enemy

The Struggle Is Real

Looking at a spreadsheet of 30,000+ rows is akin to being told you have to count rice grains individually—possible, but desiccating. I had to sort an ocean of e-commerce listings by use, customer, size, and even movie franchises (which, twist of fate, I wasn't fully aware of), before tomorrow's team huddle.

Imagine this: Me, laptop humming like a jet, and Excel stuck again. Good times.

The Usual Suspects (a.k.a. My Failed Attempts). On a typical day, I'd either battle Excel filters as my laptop fan tries to do lift-off or

perform a fuzzy match and see accuracy disappear faster than my morning coffee

Plot Twist: I Built a web app!

Rather than forfeiting another day to the spreadsheet gods, I chose to construct myself a sidekick. One that never grumbles, doesn't require coffee breaks, and enjoys sorting through rows and rows of data.

Let me introduce you to RowBot!

RowBot employs ChatGPT under the hood to categorize big text datasets with high accuracy. Simply insert your OpenAI key, explain your categories, and let it do its magic.

The best thing? It's made for us consultants who go through these cleaning/labeling tasks every other week!

What Makes RowBot Actually Useful

• Smart Batching: Classify 100K rows for roughly $10–15 by processing in smart chunks. That's less expensive than paying someone minimum wage to work 200+ hours.

• Learning Mode: Go through the first ~500 rows, correct any errors, and RowBot learns your corrections for the remaining 99,500 rows. That's like teaching your best intern.

• Job History: All your classification runs are stored and can be searched. No longer "wait, how did I classify this last month?"

• Category Discovery: Don't know every conceivable category? Turn on AI-aided discovery and receive intelligent suggestions to begin with.

• Consistency Guardian: Continues high-quality examples from batch to batch, so your classifications don't wander halfway through.

Here is a quick step by step guide (not that you need it!)

The Dream List (Coming Soon-ish)

• Industry-Smart RowBot: Retail, media, travel, etc., pre-trained modes. So it'll recognize "Batman" as superhero and not "small flying mammal."

• Knowledge Booster: Bring in external information on those strange edge cases. Because somewhere, someone needs to make "artisanal pickle-themed escape rooms." a category.

Want to Give It a Go?

RowBot rescued me from spreadsheet hell and reclaimed my nights. If you're suffocating under data that must be sorted, or you simply want to know what happens when you unleash AI on your most chaotic datasets, talk to me.

Here is the link, go check it out!

I swear RowBot won't judge your data (but it may categorize it better than you ever could).