Excel can easily remove duplicates to help you get a list of unique values in a data set.
In our example below, we have a list of states, which has some duplicates.
To remove duplicates, select a cell in the data that you want to use. Then go to the Data ribbon and click on Remove Duplicates (in the Data Tools section).
This will bring up a dialogue box which gives you some options to select different columns. Because this data has only one column, click OK.
Excel will then let you know how many duplicates it found and how many unique values remain. Click OK to get back to your data.
It’s important to note that Removing Duplicates deletes the lines that are duplicates. It will keep the first instance of each item. You can also remove duplicates based on multiple columns (see the video above). When doing so, Excel will delete any row that has a duplicate values in each column.
So if our data contained a column with cities, removing duplicates would remove items where both the state and city matched. In this example, the instance of New York/New York City and California/Los Angeles were removed.
