How to Remove Duplicate Rows in Excel

In this article, we will learn How to Remove Duplicate Rows in Excel.

Scenario

If our data is having large no. of data with duplicate entries, manual deletion would be a very big task and annoyance.

Excel is having an in-built option to remove the duplicate entries from data. Remove Duplicate option is under the Data tab in the Data Tools group in Microsoft Excel 2010 and 2013. To remove duplicate rows from a Table:

1. Select a cell in the Table range.
2. Select Design tab (in Table Tools Ribbon) -> Remove Duplicate (in Tools Group).
3. Use the Select All option or select only the columns you want to compare duplicates.

Example :

All of these might be confusing to understand. Let's understand how to use the function using an example. We have data in range A2:E13. In which column A contains month, column B contains Agent name, column C contains Country name, column D contains sales and column E contains Quantity.

Data is having duplicate entries. To remove the duplicate entries from data follow below mentioned steps:-

• Go to Data Tab, click on Remove Duplicates in Data Tools group.
• 
• Remove Duplicates dialog box will appear.
• 
• In the column box select the columns header on which basis you want to remove duplicate entries.
• In this data we want to remove duplicate entries on the agent name, we just select the Agent.
• 
• After selecting the criteria as per the requirement of data click on ok.
• You will get an information popup to inform you that how many duplicate entries were found and how many unique values are left now.

This is the way you can remove duplicate entries from the large no. of data and can get the data with unique records.

How to look if there is a duplicate value in the list or not?

When a list contains a lot of values and we need to confirm the list contains duplicate values or not. For this we will make a combination of excel functions and use the formula to get the desired result. Use the SUMPRODUCT function & COUNTIF function.

SUMPRODUCT function is a mathematical function in Excel. It operates on multiple ranges. It multiplies the corresponding arrays and then adds them.

Syntax:

COUNTIF function of excel just counts the number of cells with a specific condition in a given range.

Syntax:

Formation of the formula:

First we need to check every element of the list with every other element of the same list. Then we will set a limit on the count by subtracting 1 from each occurrence and returns the required result.

Example:

Let’s understand this formula using the example shown below. For this example, We took some names as a list in excel as shown below.

And we need to find if there's a duplicate value or not.

Use the Formula 

Explanation :

COUNTIF function counts the occurrence of each value in the list and returns an array of numbers, where number represents their counts

{ 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 2 ; 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 1 ; 2 }

Subtract 1 from each value in the list.

{ 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 1 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0 ; 1 }

Now the SUMPRODUCT function adds up all the value and returns TRUE if the result is greater than 1 or else it returns FALSE.

In the above snapshot the  formula used to get the duplicates in a list in excel.

Blank cells in the list, may cause the formula to generate incorrect results. To ignore blank cells in the list use the below formula.

Use the formula if the list contains blank cells

Here are some observational notes shown below.

Notes:

1. The formula only works with numbers and text both.
2. You can apply the formula over any column of the table where condition can be applied.
3. Careful working with fixed reference and absolute array reference.
4. Operators like equals to ( = ), less than equal to ( <= ), greater than ( > ) or not equals to ( <> ) can be performed within functions applied with numbers only.

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