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Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Remove Duplicate Records from Excel Spreadsheet

I stray away from using Microsoft Excel for data management, but sometimes it is necessary to do quick manipulations on a relatively small dataset.  For this purpose, Excel shines.  One task I assumed Excel could do, but never knew exactly how to do it was filter out duplicate records from a dataset.  After some Goggling, I found how to do this:

(1) Select the column headers and rows in the worksheet you want to remove duplicate records from.
(2) Go to the Data tab and select Advanced Filter.
(3) For action click the Filter the list, in-place radio button and check the box for Unique records only.
(4) Press OK.

You should now have a filtered worksheet with duplicate rows removed.  This can be copied and pasted to a new worksheet for further manipulation.  Hope this was helpful.  If you have improvements on the method or further questions, please add them in the comments section below.

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