The possibility of automating manual tasks that were quite cumbersome and delayed the entire development process of a company, small business or day-to-day activities has always been the main objective of many scholars in the area of technology.
One of the software that has gained the most popularity in this type of activity is Microsoft Excel, which is part of the Office office suite and is currently in its latest and beneficial Office 365 version.
How to search for repeated data in my EXCEL? – Search for duplicates
What makes Excel such an indispensable tool can be quickly discovered in its description, since we can see it as a software based on spreadsheets, which allows us to carry out different statistical and mathematical processes, easily obtain percentages or add different cells, exchange two-row data and much more.
Thanks to this, it is possible to automate tasks such as organizing a large number of data, as well as performing numerous and repetitive basic arithmetic calculations that have to be applied to them.
But to use this tool well, we need to know all its functions , which are not exactly few, so in this article we will present you how you can make use of one of its interesting functions to search for data.
Index( )
- With which formulas and functions can I search for repeated data?
- How to know in which case to use each one?
- How do I highlight certain results from a list in Excel?
- What is the best way to compare extracted data?
With which formulas and functions can I search for repeated data?
As mentioned above, Excel is usually quite effective software for organizing numbers, performing statistical analysis, and even creating graphs of big data.
One of the fundamental parts of these analyzes is to clean the data beforehand, looking for repeated values that may alter the reliability of the data and, if it is our decision, to eliminate duplicate data from the columns or use that information for another purpose.
To our luck, Excel has a function that executes this discrimination, this function is called MATCH , which allows us to indicate which are the values that match in a third column.
There is also the direct option where we can cross out the options that are repeated with colors using the highlight cell rules function , which is found in the home tab, in the style section in the style format section and then go to the data tab and there look for the delete duplicates section.
How to know in which case to use each one?
Each of these options will have different applications where, to eliminate or highlight values that are repeated directly in our spreadsheet, it will be preferable to use the highlight cell rules option .
On the contrary, if we do calculations or some statistical process with these data and it is not convenient to eliminate them, it will be preferable to use the MATCH function .
How do I highlight certain results from a list in Excel?
Now, when we need to know where these duplicates are located and we want to highlight them without having to delete them , we can make use of functions similar to those found to delete said duplicates, since they are part of this same process.
For this case, following the same route that we took for those data in which we want to highlight and delete, we will only have to go to the home tab, in the style section.
Then, in the style format section, a window will be displayed with a series of options in which we will choose to highlight cell rules , we will proceed to select the data column that we want to analyze and that’s it.
This process will be carried out automatically while Excel highlights with colors all the data that is repeated, either so that we want to apply it for another study later or we give it some other use. For any problem that may arise you can visit the Microsoft support page .
What is the best way to compare extracted data?
In the case in which we need to make a comparison, either of information imported from an external program or simply that the information has been prepared by us, the intention is that it focuses more on yielding a result than on generating colored marks on the results. data there is the MATCH function, which is found in the repertoire of function-type formulas that Excel has for us.
To make use of this function would be relatively simple, we just have to place ourselves in the column where we will make the comparison and write the form =MATCH() where, within the parentheses, we will place the cells that we are going to compare and then make use of the comparators ‘ =’, ‘<‘ and ‘>’ to obtain such a comparison.