Search for duplicates in two Excel tables

The Compare Tables for Excel tool helps to find matches and differences between two columns, lists, or tables. You choose the ranges to compare and one or several key columns. Compare Tables can identify matches (duplicates) and differences (unique values). You can select the found entries, copy or move to another worksheet or workbook, remove duplicates, highlight dupes and uniques with color.

You can try to identify matches and differences between two lists with a formula, or you can use Excel conditional formatting to highlight duplicates. The problem is that a universal formula to compare data in Excel does not exist. Every time you will have to build a new formula depending on whether you want to check for duplicates or unique values, with or without first occurrences, etc. Compare Tables for Excel can handle all these scenarios and makes the process of looking for duplicates and unique values fast and easy.

The Remove Duplicates feature available in Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013 and Excel 2016 can only search for duplicates in one table. It cannot compare two columns for differences and matches. Nor can it highlight, select, or copy dupes, only remove them.

For starters, please make sure both tables you want to check for duplicates are open in Excel, they can be in the same or different worksheets or workbooks.

Click the Compare Tables icon on the Ablebits Data tab, and do the following:

1. Select your main table. Since Excel won't let you undo changes, it makes sense to select the Create a backup copy of the worksheet checkbox.
2. Select your second table.
3. Choose what you want to find: duplicates (matches) or unique values (differences).
4. Select the key columns for comparison.
5. Choose the desired action for found data: select or highlight cells, remove duplicates, identify in a status column, copy or move the results to another location.
6. Finally, click the Finish button and have your comparison done.

For a more detailed instruction click here.

Yes. The add-in can compare two columns in Excel for matches. You just select the first column as your main table and the second column as the table for comparison.

Sure. To find duplicate lines in two tables, select several key columns on step 4. In this case, the add-in will show you duplicate rows. Once the rows are found, you can remove duplicate lines in one click.

To remove duplicate records, on step 3 select to search for duplicates. On step 5, choose the Delete values option. As the result, all duplicates will be removed from the main table.

Of course, you can. The add-in offers plenty of options to deal with dupes apart from removing them. You can get them all selected or highlighted with color, copied or moved to another worksheet or Excel file. Also, you can add a column to your main table to identify duplicate and unique rows.

To find the differences between two tables, on step 3 select to check for unique values. On step 5, decide whether to select or highlight the unique values, or mark with a status column.

Yes! Just select the Copy to another location option on step 5 and get all the unique values copied to the file you chose

Sure. The tool can find and highlight differences and matches in two tables of any size, no matter how many columns or rows each of them contains.