When you’re working with a large amount of data, you may find duplicate values within the data. On some occasions, you need those values. But on others, you want to keep only unique data. Excel makes this a breeze. Let’s learn how to remove duplicates in Microsoft Excel.
How to Remove Duplicates in Excel
Consider a list with multiple columns of data. Glancing through, you can identify certain duplicate values that appear. Of course, you could delete these manually, one by one. But Excel has a built-in feature called Remove Duplicates that does the hard, tedious work for you.
To get started, go ahead and select the range of data that you want to analyze and remove duplicate values from. In this case, that’s cells B1:B7.
Then, go to the Data tab on Excel’s ribbon. The Data tab is filled with easy-to-use analysis options that help you work with data more effectively. The option you want is called Remove Duplicates. You’ll find it just right of center on the Data tab menu.
Go ahead and click on Remove Duplicates. You’ll see a popup menu appear, asking for a series of key inputs. The checkbox at the top asks if your data has headers. This dataset doesn’t, so leave this option unchecked.
Below, you can select the column to analyze, which here is column B.
When you’re finished, press OK. Excel will display a popup window, detailing how many duplicate values were found and removed. It also displays how many unique values are contained in, and therefore remain, in your data. Notice that duplicates have disappeared from the list. Click OK again to clear the popup window.
As you can see, Excel makes it easy to remove duplicate values, with no need to manually process your data.
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