#FIND DUPLICATES IN EXCEL HOW TO#

Sub-sections include Conditional Formatting, Remove Duplicates and Advanced Filter. Identifying duplicate values in Excel? Use tools and techniques! To get the job done, check out the “Identify Duplicate Values” section. With our simple steps, you can say goodbye to unnecessary data and confusion.

#FIND DUPLICATES IN EXCEL HOW TO#

The advanced filter tool can be used to extract only unique values from a data set, or to extract duplicates and unique values based on specific criteria.ĭo you struggle to find duplicates in your spreadsheets? Our guide will show you how to quickly and easily identify and remove unnecessary duplicates in Excel.This tool is useful for creating clean and accurate data sets for analysis. The remove duplicates tool allows you to remove duplicate values from a data set, either in the entire sheet or in a specific range.It can also be used to highlight unique values and other patterns in the data. Conditional formatting highlights duplicate values in a data set using colors, allowing you to easily identify and analyze them.These include conditional formatting, remove duplicates, and advanced filtering. Excel has several built-in tools to identify duplicate values in a data set.If you want to highlight all the recurrences of a value (both duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates etc. If you change the value in E2 to 2, you will get the duplicates instead, and if you change it to 1, all the unique values will be highlighted. The result: All the triplicates are highlighted. Note that the range A2:A28 and the reference to E2 (number of occurrences) have to be locked with dollar signs (shortcut: F4). Select “Use a formula to determine which cells to format” and type this formula into the formula field:

Select the cells you want to include in the search (A2:A28 in this example), go to the Home Ribbon and choose Conditional Formatting > New Rule. So, let’s put the formula into Conditional Formatting, with one small adjustment: Instead of hard-coding the value after the equal sign (1,2,3 etc.) we’ll use a cell reference. In this example, for Robert, the statement is true for “=3”. We use the same formula as above, only with “=1”, “=2” or “=3” in the end, and we will get TRUE or FALSE for each statement. First, let’s see how our formula works when we put it in the worksheet. We will use almost the same formula in Conditional Formatting: As you might already know, Conditional Formatting uses Boolean logic, which means that it checks whether or not a statement is TRUE, and formats the cells that return TRUE. In this example the formula will return 3. In A2 we find the name Robert, so if we want to find out how many times Robert appears in the list, we can use this formula: =COUNTIF($A$2:$A$28,A2). In my example below I have 27 rows of data, with names in the range A2 to A28.

two, three or four occurrences of the same piece of data, we need another approach: Conditional Formatting with a formula.įirst, let’s find out how to count the number of occurences in a list. But sometimes we want to make it more dynamic: If we want to be able to choose between highlightning duplicates, triplicates or quadruplicates, i.e. If you only want to locate duplicates, the super-easy way above is the right way to do it. Select the cells you want to check, go to the Home Ribbon, choose Conditional Formatting and select Highlight Cell Rules > Duplicate Values.

Find duplicates in excel