Remove / Find Duplicates (Excel)
excel-dedupe• Paste a list or Excel table to remove duplicates or find only the duplicated items. • Download the result as an Excel (xlsx) file.
Paste copied Excel cells and it is read as a table (tab-separated).
When removing duplicates helps
Merging lists or email addresses from several sources leaves the same value in more than once. Stripping the duplicates is what tells you how many entries you really have, and which values appeared repeatedly.
Excel has Data → Remove Duplicates, but it overwrites the original straight away, so it is hard to see what was taken out. Here you get the de-duplicated list together with how many times each value occurred, so you can check before deleting anything.
Leading and trailing spaces and letter case decide the outcome. Decide up front whether Hong@a.com and hong@a.com count as the same value. Pasted data is processed only in your browser and never sent to a server.
Decide these before you delete anything
Duplicates almost always appear at the moment things are combined: sheets merged together, the same person applying twice, two systems exporting overlapping lists. Which of those it is changes what counts as the same record, so the first step is deciding what sameness means here, not clicking delete.
Next, decide which row survives. Deduplication normally keeps the first occurrence and drops the rest. In a table where entries pile up over time the newest rows sit at the bottom, so removing duplicates as-is leaves you with the stale copy. Sort by date descending first if the latest record is the one you want.
Check phone numbers before pasting. If the cell format is numeric the leading zero disappears and 010-1234-5678 becomes 1012345678. In a sheet where some rows are stored as text and others as numbers, the same number is counted as two different values.
Check your work with arithmetic afterwards. Subtract the deduplicated row count from the original one and you have the number removed. Far more than you expected means the matching columns were too narrow; far fewer means invisible differences kept rows from grouping.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a keyboard shortcut for removing duplicates in Excel?
Press Alt, then A, then M to open the Remove Duplicates dialog. That command overwrites the original right away, so nothing records what was deleted. If you want to look before deleting, paste the data here and compare the deduplicated list against the duplicate list first.
How do I count how many times each duplicate appears?
Choose Duplicates only and every value that appears twice or more is listed with its count next to it. In Excel you would put =COUNTIF(A:A, A2) in a helper column and filter for rows of 2 or higher to see the same thing.
How do I treat rows as duplicates only when the name and the phone number both match?
Copy several columns straight out of Excel and paste them in; the tab characters make it a table. A key column selector then appears, so tick both the name and the phone column. Only rows where every ticked column matches count as duplicates. With nothing ticked, all columns are used.
The values look identical but they are not flagged as duplicates.
Something invisible usually differs. Trailing spaces are handled by Ignore leading and trailing spaces, and letter case by turning Case sensitive off. Spaces or hyphens inside a value still make it different, so 010-1234 and 0101234 are counted separately.
The result looks cut off. How do I get all of it?
The on-screen preview stops at 300 rows. Copy and Excel (xlsx) both carry the entire result, including the rows you cannot see. If you pasted a table, the column layout is preserved in the copied text and in the downloaded file.
Is the list I paste sent anywhere?
Everything is calculated inside your browser. Pasted values are never uploaded or stored, and the xlsx file is built in the page and downloaded directly. That makes it safe for customer lists or email addresses that should not leave your machine.