Part IV: Managing and Analyzing Data
Start by moving the cell cursor to any cell within your data range. Choose Data ➪ Data
Tools ➪ Remove Duplicates, and the Remove Duplicates dialog box, shown in Figure 25.9,
appears.
FIGURE 25.9
Use the Remove Duplicates dialog box to delete duplicate rows.
If your data is in a table, you can also use Table Tools ➪ Design ➪ Tools ➪ Remove Duplicates. These two commands
work the same.
The Remove Duplicates dialog box lists all of the columns in your data range or table. Place
a check mark next to the columns that you want to be included in the duplicate search.
Most of the time, you’ll want to select all of the columns, which is the default. Click OK,
and Excel weeds out the duplicate rows and displays a message that tells you how many
duplicates it removed. If Excel deleted too many rows, you can undo the procedure by click-
ing Undo (or by pressing Ctrl+Z).
When you select all columns in the Remove Duplicates dialog box, Excel will delete a
row only if the content of every column is duplicated. In some situations, you may not
care about matching some columns, so you would deselect those columns in the Remove
Duplicates dialog box. For example, if each row has a unique ID code, Excel would never
find any duplicate rows. So, you’d want to uncheck that column in the Remove Duplicates
dialog box.
When duplicate rows are found, the first row is kept, and subsequent duplicate rows are
deleted.
