If your spreadsheet has a lot of unwanted duplicate values, you're not stuck with them. You can remove them. We'll show you how to remove duplicates in Excel.

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

In this guide, we will explore three primary techniques for removing duplicates: handling single column duplicates, managing multiple columns, and using formulas to extract unique values.

Comparing UNIQUE to Traditional Methods Before the introduction of the UNIQUE function, Excel users typically relied on the “Remove Duplicates” tool to eliminate repeated values from a dataset.

The easiest way to spot a unique value is to format it, and Microsoft Excel offers two ways to do so.