Removing duplicates from excel sheet

January 7, 2004 7:12 AM

I'm working with an alphabetical list of email addresses in Excel, approx. 8500 addresses long. Is there any quick way to remove duplicates outside of manually scrolling through and deleting them by hand?
posted by rocketman to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Best answer: You didn't say what version of excel you had, try this:
assuming the data is in columns, and has column labels, select the column, then,
Data -> Filter -> Advanced Filter -> OK -> (Check) Unique Records Only -> OK
posted by yeoz at 7:21 AM on January 7, 2004

dump it to a comma-separated text file and use a perl script or similar?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:29 AM on January 7, 2004

er, forgot one thing, in the Advanced Filter dialog, you want to select "Copy to another location"
Filtering in-place only hides values, and doesn't remove them.
posted by yeoz at 7:32 AM on January 7, 2004

Response by poster: That did it. Thanks yeoz!
posted by rocketman at 7:34 AM on January 7, 2004

bad spammer! BAD spammer!
posted by bhayes82 at 10:57 AM on January 7, 2004

File / Save As / *.txt

$ cat file.txt | sort | uniq > newfile.txt
posted by majick at 8:21 PM on January 7, 2004

Nahhh, a bad spammer wouldn't bother to weed out duplicates.
posted by deborah at 10:04 PM on January 7, 2004