Opening the Remove Duplicates Dialog Box
For help with this example see the image above.
- Click on any cell containing data in the sample database entered in the previous step.
- Click the Data tab on the Ribbon.
- Click on the Remove Duplicates icon.
- Clicking on the icon highlights all data in the database and opens the Remove Duplicates dialog box.
- When the dialog box opens, by default all of the column headings or field names from our data sample are selected.
- This means that Excel will remove only those records that have duplicate data in every field.
- Since we want to find and remove records that do not have a match in every field, we will remove the check mark from besides those column names that we do not want Excel to search.
- For this example click on the check box beside the Student ID column heading to remove the check mark.
- Excel will now only search and remove records that have matching data in the Last Name, Initial, and Program fields.
- Click OK
At this point the dialog box should close and be replaced by a message saying: 1 duplicate values found and removed; 4 unique values remain.
In addition, the record for H. Thompson with the Student ID of SA267-791 will have been removed from the database.
