Removing duplicates

When retreiving data from another application or their mass input, especially when done by more people, occurrence of repeated values is a common thing. If it’s a small amount of data, we’ll probably be able to manually remove them. However, when reviewing large tables, we can also use the Excel option that allows you to find and remove duplicates based on one or more criteria.

To find and remove duplicates, you need to select the data table first. Then, after we have positioned on the Data ribbon, we need to click on the Remove Duplicates option. The dialog box of the same name will open.

Depending on the number of columns in the table we have selected, one or more column labels will appear in the Columns list. By clicking the Select All button, we select all columns, and by clicking Unselect All we remove the selection. Individually, the columns will be selected by clicking on the check box to the left of the column name. If the table we have selected has a header it is necessary to click on the My Data Has Headers field. If we do this, the header names will automatically become column names.

The option to locate and remove duplicates removes them by the columns we selected. If we have selected multiple columns, it is necessary that all values ​​in rows for the given columns are repeated at the same time to be removed from the list. If we have selected only one column, this column will be a criterion for removing records from the list.

By clicking the OK button, we remove duplicates. If Excel has found and removed duplicates, a dialog box will be displayed indicating how many duplicates have been removed and how many unique values ​​have remained in the table.