How to quickly find duplicates in Excel

Have you ever had a long list of items and you need to quickly identify which ones are duplicates?  Thankfully, Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature makes it easy to quickly find duplicates in Excel.

Open your Excel file and highlight the data that may have duplicates.

List of movies in Excel, some of which are duplicates.

From the ribbon, select Home (tab), Styles (group), Conditional Formatting (icon), Highlight Cells Rules (menu), Duplicate Values…

Use the conditional formatting option to find duplicates in Excel

Optional:  From the second drop down choose a format for highlighting duplicate values, then click OK.

Use this dialog box to format the duplicate values

The duplicates should now appear in the format you chose.

List of movies, with the duplicates now highlighted

We hope you have found this trick useful. In a future blog post we will discuss how to use another Excel feature to easily remove duplicates from a list.

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One Response to How to quickly find duplicates in Excel

  1. Andrew A July 24, 2014 at 8:02 PM #

    Thanks for this little tip! Will save me time starting today!

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