How do you get rid of repeating rows in Excell?

Question

I have 3 lists from 3 years, every year new high schools are added and so they repeat. I want to merge the 3 years to create a report but don't know how to easily delete the repeats in excell. Can someone please help?

There are 1666 rows of possibly duplicated HS names when I put them all into a new worksheet. I sorted them and filtered them for unique values but I noticed it leaves duplicates so some schools are listed twice

Answer 1

For purpose of discussion lets say the names of the Schools are in column A and had has a header called school and the first school name is in cell A2.

Sort the spreadsheet so all the duplicate names are next to each other, Insert a temporary column next to column A and give it a temporary header name in B1. In B2 put =A1=A2 then copy this formula all the way to the bottom of data. B3 will have =A2=A3 B4 will have =A3=A4.

When done it will look like example below. Turn on the autofilter... filter on true...delete all the lines with true.


School Temp Column
Lincoln FALSE
Lincoln TRUE
Lincoln TRUE
Taft FALSE
Jackson FALSE
Jackson TRUE
Washington FALSE
Washington TRUE
Washington TRUE
Reagan FALSE
Reagan TRUE
Clinton FALSE
Clinton TRUE

Answer 2

You should be about to "sort" the rows so that all the schools are in alphabetical order. This should allow you to compare the list and delete any duplicates between them.

(Not enough detail to be able to write an automated way to do it).