Text File to Excel Cleanup

I have a plain text data file that needs to be transformed into a tidy Excel worksheet. The work is very focused:

• Import the raw text.
• Remove every duplicate row so only unique records remain.
• Replace each missing value with the single placeholder I will provide once we start (feel free to suggest the best way to flag it so it’s easy to filter later).

The final deliverable is a single .xlsx file with clean, de-duplicated data and no empty cells. I will test it by running COUNTBLANK and checking for duplicate counts, so please be sure your script or method catches everything.

Any approach is fine—Python (pandas), Power Query, Excel VBA, or your preferred tool—as long as the result meets the criteria above and you can briefly explain your steps so I can reproduce them if the data updates in the future.