100 Computer Tips in 100 Days
Tip #99 - Excel Finding Duplicate Records
I just had to compare two email lists. One was my Gmail contacts and the other was my Outlook contacts. I exported both of them to a file, deleted all but the name and the email fields and copied and pasted them into one file, but then what? Many of the names were duplicates but how to weed them out? Then I remembered the Find Duplicates feature in Excel!
This easy-to-use feature is on the Data tab, Data Tools Group (Data menu for Apple users). When you click the Find Duplicates option a window comes up asking in which columns you want to find duplicates. In my case I indicated only the email column but if you were trying to find all the duplicate records for people in the list with the same first AND last name, you would check those columns instead. Than click the OK button. Poof, duplicates have disappeared. Excel will give you a report showing the number of duplicates found.
Remember, Excel deletes the duplicate records without confirming it so you might want to make a backup of the file before you delete the duplicates.
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