MS Excel – Delete Duplicate Rows

In Microsoft Excel 2007 there is an option to delete duplicate rows. This can be handy to determine if there is duplicate points in a point list. In this case I’ve got a list of points. In the screen shot below you can see that point number 4 and 6 occupy the same point.

If I want to delete the duplicate point location I can go to the Ribbon, Data Tab and choose the Remove Duplicates button. Make sure you select the range of cells you want the command to run on first.

A dialog box will pop up asking what column information you want to compare. In this case I want to compare the Northing, Easting and Elevation columns. If you select all of them, then no rows will be removed since the point number and description for those two rows are not the same.

After pressing OK the duplicated rows with duplicate data are removed.

As you can see above the first row was kept and the second one was removed. While you probably wouldn’t want to do this with survey points, since you probably want the description of both the TC and CP, it does illustrate how to use the command in Excel.