Remove Duplicates in Excel Part 2
Related Tutorial: Remove Identical Data Records
Excel databases or lists are normally organized into rows of data called records. In a record, the data in each cell or field in the row is related - such as a company's name, address and phone number.
A common problem that occurs as a database grows in size is that of duplicate records.
Part 1 of this Remove Duplicates tutorial covered removing identical data records from a database.
While identical records do sometimes occur in Excel databases it is more common to have partial duplication of data - that is multiple records with one or more fields - such as a name field or address - containing the same data.
This common error can result in problems such as mailing multiple copies of letters and documents to the same person when the database information is used in a mail merge.
This part of the tutorial covers using Excel's Remove Duplicates data feature to remove records that have only partially matching records.
Remove Duplicates Example
For help with this example see the image above.
In this example the information for a student - H. Thompson - is contained in two separate records in the database. The only difference in the records is the Student ID field.
We will use the Remove Duplicates data tool to find and remove the second record for this student. We will do this by only matching the fields containing duplicate data.
Initially, the duplicate records are located in rows 4 and 7 of our data sample. After running Remove Duplicates the record in row 7 will be removed.
Tutorial Steps
- To begin the tutorial, add the data seen in the image above to cells A1 to D7 of an Excel worksheet.
