Removing Duplicate Rows in xls 2007

Today I feel like giving a tip. Today’s Tip is how to remove duplicate rows in Microsoft excel 2007.

Let’s take an example I have the below name and address

Name	Address
John	143 washington blvd
Smith	150 tonne ave
Sergio	34 van reipen ave
Smith	45 summit ave

In the above table there is two Smit. Now click on DataàRemove duplicates

Now you will be prompted to select columns for removing duplicate entries. (We should select name as we are going to remove the name alone)

Once you click ok, your data will look as below.

Name	Address
John	143 washington blvd
Smith	150 tonne ave
Sergio	34 van reipen ave

Now consider the below data.

First Name	Last Name	Address
William	John	143 washington blvd
Robert	Smith	150 tonne ave
Isper	Sergio	34 van reipen ave
Jing	Smith	45 summit ave
Robert	Smith	22 winkle ave

Here Smith is repeated three times where as Robert smith is repeated only two times. Now you should be caution in removing duplicates. You should select only first name to remove, incase if you select last name column to remove duplicate 3 Smith data will be removed (2 Robert Smith and 1 Jing Smith).

Though this is a cool feature, but see the address column, in the above example Robert smith is present in different address, they will be removed as the name is same. So this feature should be used wherever it’s applicable.