The things people ask before buying.

Neaten compares it against what the saved cleanup expects. If a column has been renamed it tells you which one, offers the column it thinks replaces it with a confidence figure, and waits for you to confirm — then remembers your answer. If a column a step depends on is missing, the recipe stops rather than writing blanks.

For a one-off, use Excel — you will be finished before this has downloaded. Power Query is powerful, but it is a skill, and whoever wrote the query usually ends up the only person who can maintain it. Neaten is for the cleanup you have already done four times. It shows the steps in plain words anyone can open, and when next month renames a column, it tells you.

A chatbot handles the first file well. Next month you describe the whole job again, and it cannot tell you that a column it used last time is missing — it will hand you something confident and wrong. Neaten saves the cleanup as steps and re-runs them, so the same file gives the same answer twice.

It opens messy CSV and Excel exports, tells you what is wrong with them, lets you fix it while showing you every change, combines several files into one, and writes a clean workbook. Then it saves the whole cleanup so you can run it again next month on the new file.

CSV, TSV and Excel workbooks. It detects the separator and the text encoding for you, including the ones that make Excel show  in the first cell. It exports to Excel or CSV.

No. There is no Neaten server to upload them to. Files are read, changed and written on your own computer, and the published build has no telemetry — not disabled, absent. Check it with a network monitor if you like.

Never. An export writes a new file and leaves the one you started from exactly as it was. Neaten refuses to overwrite an existing file rather than asking a question you might answer too quickly.

The cleanup you built, saved. Every step, in order, with the column matching and the decisions you made along the way — including which way round it should read an ambiguous date. Next month you open the new export, run the recipe, and export.

Yes, and it warns you on the way in. A value like 004182 loses its leading zeros the moment a spreadsheet opens it, and long numeric references get rounded. Neaten flags the column when it reads the file and writes those values as text, so nothing reinterprets them.

Only if you want it to. There is an optional assistant you can describe a cleanup to, and it proposes steps. It uses your own API key, it is off until you turn it on, and it is sent column names and types — never the contents of your cells. Everything else is ordinary deterministic software, which is why the same recipe on the same file gives the same answer twice.

Perpetual use of Neaten 1, including every 1.x update, with nothing to renew and nothing to cancel. If a Neaten 2 is ever released, your key keeps working on 1.x and you decide then whether the new one is worth buying.

Yes — 5 exports, no card and no account. Everything else is unlimited: open as many files as you like, combine them, build the cleanup, preview every change. Only exporting your own data counts, and exports of the bundled example data never count at all. There is no time limit.

macOS 11 or later, on Apple silicon. It is a native desktop application of a few megabytes, not a browser wrapped in a window. A Windows build is planned but not published yet, and there is no Linux build, no web version and no phone app.

Yes, on the computers you use. The licence verifies offline, so there is no seat counter and no activation limit to get stuck behind when you replace a laptop. It is a licence for a person, not a machine.

A monthly or yearly subscription issues a licence key that renews with the payment. Cancelling is one click in the billing portal — no retention flow, nobody to talk to. Your licence works until the end of the period you have paid for.

You press "Check for updates" in Settings when you feel like it. No automatic check, no background process, no nagging. An update is signed, and Neaten installs one only if the signature matches the key built into the copy you already have — so an update cannot come from anywhere else. The download page also publishes a SHA-256 for the installer itself, if you would rather check that by hand.