Let’s say you’ve come across raw data you’ve copied and pasted to your Google Sheets for sorting. They contain several duplicates but it will take all night to edit the raw data out. You then search on Google how to remove duplicate entries on Google Sheets to make your work easier.
You’ve come to the right place, a savvy Google user. Let’s now see the specifics on how to find and remove duplicates in google sheets, shall we?
Why Do You Need to Remove Duplicates in Google Sheets?
Having duplicate entries on your table or spreadsheet is a bummer and a half for obvious reasons. The redundancies make your data inaccurate for one thing. For another thing, if it’s an invoice, you obviously don’t want to pay for the same project or article twice.
Regardless, Google Sheets—like Microsoft Excel before it—is an electronic spreadsheet with certain perks included. It has a feature that sorts out the duplicates for you so that you won’t have to pore through an unsorted chart to find those redundant entries.
Even if you can sort them by name so that you can delete duplicate entries can be a hassle, since you still have to double-check if it’s a duplicate entry or a similarly named yet separate entry on the table.
How to Find and Remove Duplicates in Google Sheets
Step 1: Open a spreadsheet you know has duplicates in them. In this case, the duplicates are problematic because it’s an invoice sheet with a huge sum included. As a client, you don’t want to pay for the same article or project twice!
Also, pay attention to the “Total Amount Payable” part. In particular, remember that sum of money. That becomes relevant later.
Step 2: Select all the data then go to the “Data” menu, click on “Data cleanup”, and then select “Remove duplicates” specifically. This is Google Sheets’ native duplicate removal feature.
Step 3: The “Remove duplicates” window should appear, asking you to check or uncheck certain columns or boxes. For the purposes of this table, I can have it all checked without issue. I can also check “Data has header row” to make the sorting easier for the app.
Once you’re done, just click on the “Remove duplicates” button.
Step 4: After the feature is done identifying the duplicates, it will then remove them all. In my case, it found 60 duplicate rows (complete with identical data on Quantity of Order, Keywords/Topics, Number of Words, Price Per Article, and Price Per Set).
There are also 189 unique rows remaining on the table. This should result in a more accurate “Total Amount Payable” result.
Step 5: As expected, the Total Amount Payable is about $20,000 less than before, which is a huge boon for the client. If he had approved of the invoice unchecked and without any vetting, he would’ve paid $20,000 more than he was supposed to!
In Essence
Thank goodness for the advancements in technology, am I right? You can use the Google Sheets feature in order to remove duplicates from collected email address from your website, customer survey results, and so forth.
Redundancies do happen, and the last thing you want to do is inflate numbers and come up with an inaccurate scenario in regards to how well or how badly customers have received a product, how big your sales are in the last quarter, and how many contacts you got in your address book.
References:
- Deb Tennen, “How to Remove Duplicates in Google Sheets“, Zapier.com, May 28, 2018
- TechJunkie, “How to Find and Remove Duplicates in Google Sheets“, YouTube, August 7, 2021
- “How To Remove Duplicates In Google Sheets (3 Easy Ways)“, SpreadsheetPoint.com, Retrieved June 20, 2022