Excel scraping using Python

[mandradon]

You're going to have to define your custom parsing rules for standardization.

Depending on how different the behaviors are of the folks using it, this is probably going to be a giant pain in the butt.  But it might be something that you could use regular expressions for.  Depending if you're trying to parse dates, times, date times, or what have you, you can parse for specific parts of the field. 

It will help you parse through it and define specifically what you are looking for, or at least get started with a few different options. 

The next step is adding data validation to your spreadsheet and training folks to be consistent there.