The tutorial explains how to remove duplicates in Excel 2016, Excel 2013, and Excel 2010. You will learn a few different techniques to find and delete duplicate values with or without first occurrences, get rid of duplicate rows, detect absolute duplicates and partial matches.
Although Microsoft Excel is primarily a calculation tool, its sheets are often used as databases to keep track of inventories, make sales reports or maintain mailing lists.
A common problem that occurs as a database grows in size is that many duplicate rows appear in it. And even if your huge database contains just a handful of identical records, those few duplicates can cause a whole lot of problems, for example mailing multiple copies of the same document to the same person, or calculating the same numbers more than once in a summary report. So, before using a database, it makes sense to check it for duplicate entries, to make sure you are not wasting time on repeating your efforts.
In a couple of our recent articles, we discussed various ways to identify duplicates in Excel and highlight duplicate cells or rows. However, there may be situations when you may want to ultimately eliminate duplicates in your Excel sheets. And that's exactly the subject of this tutorial.
If you are using the recent version of Microsoft Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013 or Excel 2016, you have a bit of advantage because these versions contain a built-in feature for finding and removing duplicates called, not surprisingly, Remove Duplicates.
This tool allows you to find and remove absolute duplicates (cells or entire rows) as well as partially matching records (rows that have identical values in a specified column or columns). To perform this, follow the below steps.
Done! All duplicate rows in the selected range are deleted, and a message is displayed indicating how many duplicate entries have been removed and how many unique values remain.
Another way to get rid of duplicates in Excel is separating unique values, and copying them to another sheet or a different workbook. The detailed steps follow below.
One more way to delete duplicate values in Excel is to identify them using a formula, filter out, and then delete duplicate rows.
An advantage of this approach is versatility - it lets you find and delete duplicate values in one column or duplicates rows based on values in several columns, with or without first instances. A drawback is that you will need to remember a handful of duplicate formulas.
=IF(COUNTIF($A$2:$A2, $A2)>1, "Duplicate", "")
=IF(COUNTIF($A$2:$A$10, $A2)>1, "Duplicate", "Unique")
Where A2 is the first and A10 is the last cell of the range to be searched for duplicates.
Formulas to find duplicate rows
=IF(COUNTIFS($A$2:$A2, $A2, $B$2:$B2, $B2, $C$2:$C2, $C2)>1, "Duplicate row", "Unique")
=IF(COUNTIFS($A$2:$A$10, $A2, $B$2:$B$10, $B2, $C$2:$C$10, $C2)>1, "Duplicate row", "Unique")
Where A, B, and C are the columns to be checked for duplicate values.
For example, this is how you can identify duplicate rows except for 1st instances:
For more information about using duplicate formulas, check out How to identify duplicates in Excel.
In a similar manner, you can find and delete a specific duplicate occurrence(s), for example only 2nd or 3nd instances, or 2nd and all subsequent duplicate values. You will find an appropriate formula and step-by-step instructions in this tutorial: How to filter duplicates by their occurrences.
Well, as you have just seen there is a number of ways to find and remove duplicates in Excel, each having its strong points and limitations. But what would you say if instead of those numerous duplicate removing techniques, you had one universal solution that wouldn't require memorizing a bunch of formulas and would work in all scenarios? The good news is that such a solution does exist, and I will demonstrate it to you in the next and final part of this tutorial.
Unlike the inbuilt Excel Remove Duplicate feature, the Ablebits Duplicate Remover add-in is not limited to only removing duplicate entries. Like a Swiss knife, this multi-tool combines all essential use cases and lets you identify, select, highlight, delete, copy and move unique or duplicate values, absolute duplicate rows or partially matching rows, in 1 table or by comparing 2 tables, with or without first occurrences.
It works flawlessly on all operating systems and in all versions of Microsoft Excel 2019 - 2003.
Assuming you have our Ultimate Suite installed in your Excel, perform these simple steps to eliminate duplicate rows or cells:
As you can see in the following screenshot, all duplicates rows except 1st occurrences are deleted:
And if you want to perform some other action, say, highlight duplicate rows without deleting them, or copy duplicate values to another location, select the corresponding option from the drop-down list:
If you want more options, such as deleting duplicate rows including first occurrences or finding unique values, then use the Duplicate Remover wizard that provides all these features. Below you will find full details and a step-by-step example.
Removing duplicates in Excel is a common operation. However, in each particular case, there can be a number of specificities. While the Dedupe Table tool focuses on speed, the Duplicate Remover offers a number of additional options to dedupe your Excel sheets exactly the way you want.
In this example, let's delete duplicate rows including 1st occurrences:
That's it! The Duplicate Remover add-in swiftly does its job and notifies you how many duplicate rows have been found and deleted:
That's how you can wipe duplicates off your Excel. I hope at least one of the solutions mentioned in this tutorial will work for you.
All of the powerful dedupe tools discussed above are included in our Ultimate Suite for Excel. If you are interested to give them a try, I encourage you to download a fully-functional trial version, and let us know your feedback in comments.
If you like the Duplicate Remover add-in and decide to obtain a license, we are happy to make you this exclusive offer:
15 responses to "How to remove duplicates in Excel (duplicate rows, values and partial matches)"
I'm looking for a solution to mass delete a cell that appears in a row with the same value twice the spread sheets we have are 10,000+ rows and it is very tedious to remove them all by using conditional formatting and going through it by hand. The sheet contains contact information and sometimes the numbers are listed twice for the accounts we have and to stop them from being loaded into our software twice we have to go through and delete them out of the sheet first. The problem with just deleting them using the remove duplicate tool is that the person may have two separate accounts and it would remove the phone number from a row further down the page.
I WANT THE SAME SOLUTION
Dear fnd,
How i can remove one of repeat (text or numbers) from a cell.
Thanks & Regards
Hanuman Singh
Mobile No. 9034509168
Hi Svetlana,
I am looking to delete duplicates in one column in separate rows but keeping the additional values in different columns of each row and create a total new list.
Col A . ColB . ColC
Name 3 1
Name 2
Name 5 4
Name 6
Result
Name 1 2 3 4 5 6
By the way, thank you for all these!
Hi Svetlana,
I am looking to find duplicates and sum the duplicates in the same column .
I use the following formula to find duplicated = countif( A1:A7,A1) , so how
i can sum the duplicated in same column when i find the duplicates
8195022618495887 50 2
8195022618495887 500 1
A B C
Cards No Balance Duplicated
8193041466505317 25 1
8193220122990838 25 1
8193323426658387 25 1
8194697882227576 50 1
8195022618495887 50 2
8195022618495887 500 1
8197847512417947 25 1
Hello,
For me to understand the problem better, please send me a small sample workbook with your source data and the result you expect to get to support@ablebits.com. Please don't worry if you have confidential information there, we never disclose the data we get from our customers and delete it as soon as the problem is resolved.
Please also don't forget to include the link to this comment into your email.
I'll look into your task and try to help.
In my dataset. each row OF A COLUMN contains this type of data, as:
Car-01 (80),Car-02 (35), Bus-01 (60), Bus-03 (90)
Bus-03 (120),Bus-01(69)
Now I want to remove the "Car-", "Bus-" etc from the 2nd to last but keeping the first. As:
Car-01 (80),02 (35), Bus-01 (60), 03(90)
Bus-03 (120),01(69)
is there any vba for this??
Hello,
I'm afraid there's no easy way to solve your task with a formula. Using a VBA macro would be the best option here.
However, since we do not cover the programming area (VBA-related questions), I can advice you to try and look for the solution in VBA sections on mrexcel.com or excelforum.com.
Sorry I can't assist you better.
I have quite a large spreadsheet and I need to remove items with more than 3 duplicates. How can I do that?
I learnt to find the duplicate in a excel sheet, now i want to rearrange the 2 duplicate values in a same row. Can somebody help on it?
Eg:
Apple Kiwi
Banana Orange
orange Apple
Kiwi Banana
Done to find duplicate, now want the result as:
Apple Apple
Banana Banana
Orange Orange
Kiwi Kiwi
Thanks
Wow This is soooo Close to the answer I need to find out! This is exactly what I need minus one caveat. I need the formula whether that be in standard excel or through the Ablebits ad ins to remove all duplicates except for the last occurrence. Is that possible??
Hi,
Want to delete duplicate cells in each row
I have rows of data with duplicate cells in each row. I do not want to delete any rows. I want to delete only duplicate cells in each row.
For example, I now have in one row...
fox, sheep, goat, fox, dog, cat, fox
I want to delete the duplicate cells in each row. I want to end up with the following...
fox, sheep, goat, dog, cat
Thank you in advance for any replies.
Hello Eren!
If I understand your task correctly, in order to remove duplicates in rows, you can transpose your table. Rows and columns will be swapped. How to do this, read this guide.
Then remove duplicates in the columns using any of the methods recommended above. Then transpose again.
Alexander,
Can you do this technique where the original data has over 1100 rows?
Hello Carol!
Manually working with so much data is very difficult. Therefore, I recommend using the ready-made solution Ablebits Tools - Transpose and Ablebits Data - Duplicate Remover.
This tool is available as a part of our Ultimate Suite for Excel that you can install in a trial mode and use for free: https://www.ablebits.com/files/get.php?addin=xl-suite&f=free-trial