How to Remove Duplicates in Excel

About this video

Kevin Stratvert demonstrates three quick ways to remove duplicates in Excel. First, for a single column, he selects the names or the entire column, goes to the Data tab, clicks Remove Duplicates, leaves the headers option unchecked when there are no headers, and clicks OK — in his example Excel removed five duplicates and 10 unique values remained. Second, for multiple columns, he selects the data, uses Remove Duplicates with ‘My data has headers’ checked, and explains Excel checks combinations of the checked columns; unchecking Email, for example, means it looks only for duplicate first and last name combinations, and entire duplicate rows are removed — 22 duplicates were removed in the example. Third, he uses the UNIQUE formula when the goal is to extract unique values without deleting the original data, entering =UNIQUE over a name and email range in cell F2 and noting the result spills into neighboring cells. He also explains UNIQUE’s by_col parameter to find uniques across columns instead of rows, and the exactly_once parameter, which when set to true returns only rows that appear once — in his example, only Emily Davis.

Key takeaways

• Single-column method: select the data, Data tab > Remove Duplicates, set the headers option correctly, and click OK
• Multi-column method: Excel finds duplicates based on the combination of checked columns, but removes the entire duplicate rows
• Checking or unchecking a column like Email changes the duplicate definition — e.g., first+last name only versus name+email
• Use the UNIQUE formula to extract a unique list without deleting the original data; results spill into neighboring cells
• UNIQUE’s by_col parameter checks across columns, and exactly_once set to true returns only values that occur a single time

Episode details: published September 25, 2024 · 3:28 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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