How to Remove Duplicates in Excel

Your list has the same customer, email, or order number entered more than once, and you need one copy of each. Excel's Remove Duplicates tool deletes the repeated rows in place and reports how many it removed.

Copy the sheet first

Remove Duplicates deletes rows permanently. Right-click the sheet tab, choose Move or Copy, check Create a copy, and click OK. Work on the copy, or keep it as a backup. If you skip this step and the result is wrong, press Ctrl + Z (Mac: Cmd + Z) immediately, before doing anything else.

Select the range

Click any cell inside the data. Excel expands the selection to the surrounding block on its own. To limit the check to a specific area, select those cells directly.

Open Remove Duplicates

Click the Data tab, then Remove Duplicates in the Data Tools group. A dialog lists every column in the selection. On Mac the button is in the same place on the Data tab.

Tell Excel about headers

If the first row contains column names, check My data has headers. Otherwise the header row is treated as data and the column list shows Column A, Column B, and so on.

Choose the columns to compare

Leave every column checked to remove only rows that are identical in every column. To treat rows as duplicates based on one or two fields, click Unselect All, then check only those columns, for example Email.

With these rows and only Email checked, the second row is removed even though the name is spelled differently:

Name          Email
Dana Ruiz     dana@example.com
D. Ruiz       dana@example.com
Sam Okafor    sam@example.com

Matching ignores letter case, so DANA@example.com and dana@example.com count as the same value.

Click OK and read the report

Excel removes the repeated rows, keeping the first occurrence of each, and shows a message such as "1 duplicate value found and removed; 2 unique values remain." Click OK to close it. Rows below the data move up to fill the gaps.

To see duplicates without deleting them. Select the column, then click Home, Conditional Formatting, Highlight Cells Rules, Duplicate Values, and click OK. Every repeated value is shaded so you can review them by hand.

To keep the original list intact. In Microsoft 365, =UNIQUE(A2:A100) returns a de-duplicated copy of the range starting in the cell where you type it, and the original column stays as it is.