Microsoft Excel has the ability to recognize the data stored in it. No matter what kind of values they are, Excel has the ability to recognize currency, numbers, dates, textual and other types of data. This recognition feature helps the users to find out the similar data and point out the repeating datasets.
You can easily find out the duplicate values in Microsoft Excel and delete them. In Excel the Highlight and delete functions help the users to find out the duplicate values. It is also possible to only find the duplicate values for data extraction purposes and not to delete them.
Finding Duplicate Values in Excel
Filtering is also possible for some specific set of selected cells or the entire spreadsheet. It is a very simple task which can be done by following a few simple steps.
- From the Home tab
- Choose the Conditional Formatting
- Choose Highlight Cells Rules and go to Duplicate Values option in the selected rows and columns
- A little window will also come up that allow choosing the color of the duplicate values
- Choose the color scheme or create a custom scheme with the Custom Format Option
- Set the cell font color, border color and fill font color by creating the custom format
Deleting Duplicate Values in Excel
You can manually delete the values as well as use the Excel purge functionality.
- Choose the Row or column you want to remove but the manual deletion is limited to only one row and one column.
- After selection goes to the Data tab and click on the Remove Duplicates button.
In case the selection is multiple rows and multiple columns, the excel will not find the duplications. As they become data sets.