Quick Tip! - Finding Duplicates in your Data

You're giving the following data and are assigned with finding duplicate email addresses. If you're like me, lazy and don't want to manually go through rows of data, the quickest method of finding duplicates is by using conditional formatting. Here's how we do that

 

Step 1 - Highlight the column we would like to search for duplicates in, in this case the Email column. 

 

Step 2 - In the home tab, navigate to "Conditional Formatting" → "Highlight Cell Rules" → "Duplicate Values..."

 

Step 3 - A dialog box will appear, select the appropriate items in the drop down. In this example we are leaving the selections as the default

At this point the duplicated data will be highlighted. In our small data set this should be enough to identify all our duplicates however there may be times when you are working with data containing hundreds or thousands of rows. In that case we would want to filter the data

Filtering the data - Navigate to the data tab and select filter. Drop downs should appear at the header row of your data. Select the drop down over email and navigate to "Filter by Color" → "Filter by Cell Color". Select pink

Now the only rows visible will contain your duplicate values.