Thursday 8 October 2009

Locating Duplicates in Excel

If you work with large Excel files regularly, it can be a pain in the neck to find duplicates in a column of data.

You could export the file to a text file and load it into a database, and use a query to find the duplicates - but that's probably the sledgehammer approach.

The problem is that Excel doesn't appear to offer a straightforward way of identifying duplicates, but it can be done using Conditional Formatting.

Rather than reinvent the wheel and write a detailed how-to here, it's a good idea to link to the definitive authority on the subject: Microsoft. So here's a link to an article which shows you how to locate duplicates in a matter of seconds. Hope it's useful.

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