All articles with 'unique items' Tag

Last night I got an email from Joshua, one of our readers with the subject – Hard Excel problem. Hard?!?, at this stage of summer, the hard problems seem to be (in no particular order),

1. Lack of good quality mangoes to eat
2. Intense heat and humidity
3. Lack of good quality mangoes to eat

Yes, I like mangoes.

Any how, back to Joshua’s email, So I got curios and read it. He is facing a curious problem.

By now, we know how to remove duplicates from data. You can use the Remove Duplicates button to do that.

But do you know that we can use remove duplicates button to get rid off duplicate combinations too?

Remove duplicate combinations – Tutorial

To remove duplicate combinations in your data, just follow below 4 steps:

1. Select your data
2. Click on Data > Remove Duplicates button
3. Make sure all columns are checked
4. Click ok and done!

See this demo:

Hello folks,

Time for another homework problem. Assuming you have 2 ranges of values like below, how do you check if both of them have same set of values?

A while ago (well more than 3 years ago), I wrote about an array formula based technique to check if a list of values have any duplicates in them.

Today, lets learn a simpler formula to check if a list has duplicate numbers.

Assuming you have some numbers in a range B4:B10 as shown below, we can use MODE + COUNTIF formulas to check if there are any duplicate values in a list.

Almost an year ago, we had a memorable dashboard contest on Sales Dashboards. We got 32 beautiful, outstanding, well crafted entries and it was a lot of fun learning new tricks & meeting new members of our community. I am planning to have one more dashboard contest and I need your help.

I need you to suggest a topic for the contest (optional: and give some sample data)

Just drop a comment with your suggestions (and point to source data if any). We will have a dashboard contest on one of those topics.

Read the rest of this post to get some useful Excel related links.

Removing duplicate data is like morning coffee for us, data analysts. Our day must start with it. It is no wonder that I have written extensively about it (here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). But today I want to show you a technique I have been using to dynamically extract and sort […]

Last week we discussed a fun and easy way to compare two lists of data in excel using conditional formatting. In that post, Artem commented, The quickest way to find all about two lists is to select them both and them click on Conditional Formatting -> Highlight cells rules -> Duplicate Values (Excel 2007). The […]

Here is a typical scenario: We want to allow only one of the pre-defined customer names in our spreadsheet. We have listed down all the customers in column B and want excel to check against this list and validate the data. But there are 3 problems. (1) Our list is not sorted alphabetically (2) It contains duplicates and (3) The list comes from external source, so we can not remove duplicates and sort the list every time.

Now how can we set up a simple data validation list that would not repeat customer names and shows them in sorted order like this.

Read the rest of this guest post by Hui to learn how to use data validation in creative new ways.

We all know that data validation is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use data validation to create a drop-down list in a cell and limit the values user can enter. But, do you know that you can use data validation in a multitude of ways to prevent users from entering wrong data?

Here is a practical application: Prevent users from entering duplicate values in a range of cells.

For eg. you are making an invoice. Wouldn’t it be cool if Excel prompted you when you enter a duplicate line item so that increase the item quantity instead of repeating it.

Here is an excel formula quick tip that can come handy when you need to count the number of unique values in a range of cells. Assuming we have a list of values in the range:B5:B15 and we want to know how many unique values are there,
you can use the almighty SUMPRODUCT formula like this: SUMPRODUCT(1/COUNTIF(B5:B15,B5:B15)).

Read the rest of this post to understand how the formula works. You can also find resources to work with duplicate values in excel.

It is very surprising that so many of us are still not aware of this extremely powerful tool in Excel 2007. Just with a click of the button, you can remove all the duplicate values from a list / table. To remove duplicates, (1) Just select the list of values from which you want to remove duplicates (2) Go to Data ribbon (3) Hit the Remove Duplicates button (4) Bingo…

In this installment of our spreadcheats series, we will learn how to use array formulas and findout if a list has any duplicate items. We will use Countif and array formulas to do this …

In this week’s excel links learn how to make bingo cards, make your random numbers unique and prepare your data for charting and much more…

Use Excel Pivot tables to find and extract unique items in your data. This method is very fast and easily scalable.

Often I wish Microsoft had spent the effort and time on a data genie (and a set of powerful formulas) that can automate common data cleanup tasks like extracting duplicates, makings lists unique, find missing items, remove spaces etc. Alas, instead they have provided features like clippy which are intrusive to say the least. So […]