Microsoft Excel is one of the greatest software inventions of the century designed to make your life easier. Now with the help of Excel you can complete those lengthy, time consuming tasks easily. The trouble with lengthy spreadsheets is the amount of duplicates that crop up when you are trying to mail them or sorting through all those old folders of spreadsheets to link the various financial threads. Now, with MS Excel you can identify and delete those duplicates with very little effort.

When it comes to values in MS Excel, you can do either of these two things- Identify unique values and/or delete duplicate values. Filtering for unique values or deleting duplicate values are two of the most closely related tasks because in both cases the results displayed are the same. The results in these two cases show a list of unique values. There is an essential difference of course and that is when you choose to filter or identify unique values, the duplicates are temporarily hidden to show you only the list of unique values but when you choose to delete duplicates you delete them permanently.

Duplicate values are when the values I one row exactly match the values in another row. The value displayed in the cell is counted as the duplicate values rather than the value stored in the cell. Before removing duplicate values, it is advisable to filter for unique values or start out with formatting the unique values just to confirm that the results are exactly what you want. It is always better to double check unique values before proceeding to delete the duplicates.

The steps to filter for unique values are:

     * Select the range of cells and make sure that the active cell is in the table.

     * Click Advanced on the Data tab in the Sort and Filter option.

Then do one of the following in the Advanced Filter Dialogue Box-

     * Click Filter the list to filter the range of cells or table in place.

     * To copy the filtered results you can click Copy to another location then in the cell reference.

An alternative method is

     * click Collapse Dialogue Button image to temporarily hide the dialogue box

     * Select a cell then press Expand Dialogue Button image

     * Select the check box of Unique records only and click OK

     * The unique values from the selected range of cells are copied to the new specified location.

When you delete duplicate values only the values contained in the range of cells are deleted but the values outside are not affected. When deleting data, it is important to copy the data to another spreadsheet before deleting.

The steps to delete duplicate data are:

     * Select the range of cells and make sure that the active cell is in a table

     * Click Remove Duplicates on the Data Tab in the Data Tools option

     * Select the number of columns under Columns

     * To select the range of columns you want to delete

     * Click OK and the specified range of columns will be deleted

   So deleting duplicates in MS Excel is really a piece of cake.