SubscribeQuickly display unique items in an excel list using advanced filters
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:
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.
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At Pointy Haired Dilbert, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". PHD is started in 2007 and today has 300+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts. 
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.
@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.
Welcome to PHD, hope you liked my little site..
Welcome to PHD, hope you liked my little site..
Good job with the site – lots of interesting tips and tricks!
uh… sorry about that – my html attempt didn’t quite work out…
Well
Even when i moved to Office 2007 i was little confused about new shape – Maybe still, but i must admit, with time, when user get used to it, its much more time saving.
Regards.
I use the Advanced filtering and ask for Unique values but it fails multiple times to eliminate one of the two “1″s in the data set of 36 numbers. WHY? “Remove Duplicates” does it flawlessly. What’s wrong? I’ve reentered the data so it’s not a lower-case L masquarading as a number 1. It’s not a formula.
I think Excel is looking for a “header”. Add a column title and include that in the range being filtered.