How to remove duplicates in Excel column

Microsoft Excel provide very useful tool of “Remove Duplicates”. This is present in the Data tab. It can have various use cases, and help working on data in a much easier fashion. In case the requirement is to remove duplicates from a specific column, this feature can be used. This helps to identify distinct number of rows present in the column. This can be very handy tool in analyzing datasets.

Emma has a yearly spend data for some of the customers across globe. She is not sure how many countries are available in the dataset. She want to know remove duplicates from country column and know the number of countries.

Below are the key steps to remove duplicate at a column level.

• Step 1: Firsly click on “Data Tab” from the main tabs.

• Step 2: Then make a copy of Country column away from existing table.

• Step 3: Click on “Remove Duplicates” option from Data tab.

Step 4: Finally click ok to remove duplicates, the result will have distinct values from country column.

Another way to go about this is removing duplicates from the same table. But this will loose data from other columns. Below are the key steps to follow the same.

• Step 1: Firstly click on the Data Tabs.

• Step 2: Click on Remove Duplicates option.

• Step 3: Then uncheck all columns, just keep Country checked.

• Step 4: Finally click ok, the new data will have distinct rows based on countries.

Thus, remove duplicate feature can be very helpful Excel. There can be many occasion where duplicate rows removal feature can be useful. The above example illustrates one such example.

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