MS-Excel / General Formatting

Removing Duplicate Rows from a Table

If you have a table with duplicated information, you might want to remove the rows containing the duplicates before analyzing the data. Excel provides many convenient options for removing duplicated data. For example, you can choose to remove duplicates if the entire row is duplicated (the default option) or you can choose to remove rows if the data in one or more columns is duplicated.

Follow these steps to remove duplicated data from your table:

  1. Click any cell in the table, and then click the Design tab on the Ribbon.
  2. Click the Remove Duplicates button. Excel selects the entire data area of the table and displays the Remove Duplicates dialog box.
  3. If you want to remove rows in which all column data is duplicated, click OK. If you want to remove rows in which only data in one or more columns is duplicated (for example, a last name), select the column or columns and click OK.

The duplicated data is removed from the table permanently. If the result of the removal operation is not what you want, you can undo the operation (click the undo button on the Quick Access toolbar or press Ctrl+Z) and start over.

If you want to remove duplicates from worksheet database that's not a table, choose Data> Data Tools> Remove Duplicates.

If you want to retain your original data, you can select and copy the table to another worksheet. If you have a particularly large data range, make a copy of the worksheet.

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