Quickly display unique items in an excel list using advanced filters

By Chandoo at 19 June, 2008, 9:01 pm

Imagine you have long list of data and you need to quickly identify which of the items are unique. You can use Advanced Filters to do this.

Just select the list of items you want to filter, go to menu > Data > Filter > Advanced filter. You will see a dialog box like this:

excel-advanced-filter-unique-items

Thats all, when you click ok you will see unique items of the selected list. Quick, aint it?

If you want to see all items, go to menu > Data > Filter > show all.

clear filters in excel how to

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Comments

Dulan August 10, 2008

Until I switched to Excel 2007, I used an alternate approach - pivot tables. It’s probably not as easy as this method, but it achieves the same thing.

Select the data, create a pivot table and then put the field you want the uniques as the rows - same result, but results in an additional worksheet.

Chandoo August 11, 2008

@Dulan: thanks for sharing this idea with our readers, I have used Pivot tables to quickly extract unique items, items with more than certain number of entries etc, when I was processing huge amounts of sales data for monthly reports. Its very fast and easy.

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