Microsoft Excel is perhaps the most powerful spreadsheet application you can buy. But it also has some simple functions, like finding duplicates in data.

How to compare columns in Microsoft Excel As stated, we can use the Excel VLOOKUP function to find and match different data or find differences in two columns.

To pinpoint duplicate entries, apply Excel's conditional formatting feature: Open the Excel worksheet containing the data in question. Select the column or range you want to inspect for duplicates.

If you wish to count the same or duplicate values in a column only once in Excel or the count of occurances of duplicate values, read this article.

Specify columns: Excel will prompt you to specify which columns you want to consider when identifying duplicates.

Of course, there are other ways to identify multi-column duplicates in Excel, but this one requires no specialized knowledge and is incredibly easy to implement.

How Can I Merge Two Columns of Data Using Microsoft Excel and Eliminate Duplicate Values?. There are two situations in which you might need to merge two columns of data in Excel 2013. If you've ...

When you evaluate a single column of data, Excel finds single-cell duplicates. When you look for duplicates in data spanning two columns, a two-column pair of cells must match another pair, and so on.

How to remove duplicates in Excel for a single column When you have duplicate data that you want to remove from a single column in your dataset, start by clicking into the column you want to dedupe.