How to highlight duplicates in Excel

The question “How to highlight duplicates in Excel?” is the one that comes up most frequently in data analytics interviews. Regardless of how much data there is, highlighting duplicate cells in Excel only requires a few simple clicks and can be done quickly and easily. You will be able to master the data analysis procedure that is the most helpful to use by reading this article on highlighting duplicates in Excel.

Excel can be a confusing landscape of chaos if you don’t know what you’re doing, so something like highlighting duplicates, which should be easy, ends up being a journey through a maze that is guarded by a minotaur. This can be frustrating. Excel is a highly effective data management tool that is utilized across a wide variety of business sectors all over the world. Excel, like any other data management tool, has the potential to contain duplicates, which can throw off the analysis and interpretation of the data.

Because of this, it is essential to identify duplicates and take the necessary steps to manage them. We are going to teach you the ways of Excel, specifically how to highlight duplicates in Excel. In other words, we are going to take the bull by the horns and teach you the ways of Excel. In case you were interested in that rather than what you were looking for, we have already written about how to highlight duplicates in Excel.

How to highlight duplicates in Excel

1. Select the range of cells you want to check for duplicates.
2. Click the Home tab.
3. In the Styles group, click Conditional Formatting.
4. Select New Rule.
5. In the New Formatting Rule dialog box, select Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
6. In the Format values where this formula is true box, enter the following formula:
   • =COUNTIF($A:$A,$A2)>1
7. Click the Format button.
8. In the Format Cells dialog box, select the formatting you want to apply to the duplicate cells.
9. Click OK.
10. Click OK again to close the New Formatting Rule dialog box.

Why Highlighting Duplicates Is Important

1. Data Accuracy: Identifying and highlighting duplicate values helps maintain data accuracy. Duplicate entries can lead to errors, misinterpretations, and discrepancies in your data.
2. Data Quality: Highlighting duplicates allows you to quickly spot and address data quality issues. It ensures that your data is clean and reliable for analysis or reporting.
3. Error Prevention: By flagging duplicates, you can avoid unintentional data entry errors. It prompts users to verify and correct duplicate entries, reducing the risk of mistakes.
4. Efficiency: Identifying duplicates helps in data deduplication, which streamlines data management and analysis. This can save time and effort by preventing the need to manually sift through data to identify duplicates.
5. Data Analysis: When working with large datasets, highlighting duplicates can be crucial for analysis. It allows you to focus on unique values or assess the impact of duplicates on your analysis results.
6. Data Integrity: For relational databases and data with unique identifiers, highlighting duplicates helps ensure data integrity. It prevents situations where different records erroneously share the same identifier.

Troubleshooting Common Issues When Highlighting Duplicates in Excel

1. Check Data Format: Always make sure that the data in the column where you want to find duplicates is formatted the same way. Even small differences, like extra spaces or different letter cases, can make Excel not be able to tell the difference between two items that are identical.
2. Choose the Right Range: Make sure you’ve chosen the right range of cells that hold the information you want to look for duplicates. If you highlight duplicates in the wrong range, strange things can happen.
3. Conditional Formatting: To find duplicates, use Excel’s built-in Conditional Formatting feature. To get rid of duplicate values, go to the “Home” tab, click “Conditional Formatting,” and then click “Highlight Cells Rules.” Check to see if you’ve chosen the right colors and formatting.
4. Not Seeing Duplicate Values: If Excel isn’t seeing duplicates, make sure the data range doesn’t have any hidden or filtered data in it. It’s possible for hidden rows or columns to mess up the process of finding duplicates.
5. Data Cleaning: Get rid of extra spaces at the beginning and end of lines, change all lowercase letters and numbers to their lowercase equivalents, and get rid of any special characters that could make it harder to find duplicates.
6. Match Type: Choose whether you want to show only exact duplicates or only partial matches. Excel automatically shows duplicates that are exact matches. To show only parts of a match, you might need to use special formulas or VBA scripts.

Conclusion

A value that appears more than once in a spreadsheet is referred to as having a duplicate value. When working with datasets, you will frequently encounter these, and it can be time-consuming to sort through them if you are not familiar with the efficient ways to locate them. Mastering Excel’s “highlight duplicates” feature will cut your time spent on this step down to under a minute. You can go as far as customizing your settings to include only the second or third time the data appears, or to highlight only particular types of duplicates. There are a few different approaches to completing the task; however, for the sake of simplicity, we will use the same table throughout the examples. If you want to know more information about this issue so you can visit Microsoft Excel Official Website.

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