Sometimes at work, we may encounter large excel files that we have to work with, only to find out that the file has a lot of duplicate entries in it. To remove those duplicate entries we can do it manually and spend a lot of time on this tedious task, or we can use excel to do the work for us.

Excel, being a productivity software package, has the ability to save us time on some of the most common day to day tasks that can be performed on a large data set. Excel comes with a built-in feature to allow us to eliminate duplicate entries in an excel worksheet thus saving us a huge amount of time and effort.

To eliminate duplicate entries in an excel worksheet, just follow these simple steps.

Step 1:

Open data with duplicate entries, can be a large dataset or a small one with just a few entries.

Step 2:

Choose column or row (you can eliminate duplicates from columns and rows) that has information with duplicates

Step 3:

Choose Data tab and click on Remove Duplicates

Step 4: Once Remove Duplicates window comes up, column with data should be selected, If not selected, check box for Column containing data you wish to process, and hit OK button.

Once duplicate entries have been removed, a confirmation dialog box will pop –up with the results of the removal, letting you know how many entries were removed, and how many unique values are still left.