Microsoft Excel is perhaps the most powerful spreadsheet application you can buy. But it also has some simple functions, like finding duplicates in data.

How to remove duplicates in Excel for a single column When you have duplicate data that you want to remove from a single column in your dataset, start by clicking into the column you want to dedupe.

This option only appears if Excel detects data adjacent to the selected column. Uncheck all columns except the one containing the consolidated data and click "OK" to remove duplicates.

Duplicates in the same column are easy to find by sorting or filtering. Duplicates that span multiple columns require a bit of setup, but the solution's not difficult to implement.

The simple Table object in Figure A duplicates a few names across four columns. Our task is to create a single list of values repeated across any two columns. We’ll start with quarters 1 and 2.

Excel formulas like UNIQUE, COUNTIF, and CONCATENATE offer flexibility for identifying and handling duplicates in complex datasets.

If you wish to count the same or duplicate values in a column only once in Excel or the count of occurances of duplicate values, read this article.

If your spreadsheet has a lot of unwanted duplicate values, you're not stuck with them. You can remove them. We'll show you how to remove duplicates in Excel.