Excel like a finance pro.
Strip duplicate rows and know how many went
AltA, MTables & dataExports double up, and a duplicated invoice quietly overstates revenue.
Difficulty
1What it does
Remove Duplicates deletes the repeats and tells you how many it took, which is the part that matters — a silent dedupe is just data loss. The setting worth understanding is which columns it compares: tick every column and it only removes rows identical all the way across, tick just the invoice number and it treats that as the identity. Get that wrong in the permissive direction and you delete legitimate rows that happen to share a value, so work on a copy the first time.
2The shortcut
- 1Click inside the data, then
Alt + A,M. - 2Tick only the columns that define a duplicate — often one ID column, not all of them.
- 3Read the count it reports. If it removed more than you expected, undo and reconsider the columns.
3Before → after
Press the shortcut to play it on a sample sheet.
Before — the export ran twice
| A — Invoice | B — Customer | C — Amount | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | INV-1041 | Acme | 4,200 |
| 2 | INV-1042 | Globex | 9,800 |
| 3 | INV-1041 | Acme | 4,200 |
| 4 | INV-1043 | Acme | 4,200 |
| 5 | INV-1042 | Globex | 9,800 |
Two rows are exact duplicates. A third shares a customer and an amount but is a different invoice — which is the one the wrong setting will eat.
4When you use it
- Clean an export that ran twice and doubled every row.
- Reduce a transaction list to one row per invoice number.
- Build a unique customer list from a year of orders.
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