How to remove duplicates in Excel
Excel can remove exact duplicates in a couple of clicks. But in contact lists, the same person often appears with a stray space or a typo in their email, and Excel treats those as different people.
Show me how to do it myself or use the tool below.
Add your file
A CSV or Excel file exported from your store, CRM, email tool or spreadsheet.
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Check what we fixed
Names, phone numbers, emails and duplicates are fixed for you.
Download your clean file
Method 1: The Remove Duplicates button
- Click anywhere in your data.
- Go to Data → Remove Duplicates.
- Tick only the column that identifies a person (usually Email), then click OK.
Tip: ticking every column only removes rows that are identical in every cell, which misses most real duplicates.
Method 2: The UNIQUE formula (Excel 365)
To get a de-duplicated copy without changing your original data:
- Unique rows
=UNIQUE(A2:F1000)
Like the button, UNIQUE only matches values that are exactly the same.
The duplicates Excel misses
Before removing duplicates, clean the email column, otherwise these all count as different people:
- Tidy an email before comparing
=LOWER(TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(B2, "mailto:", "")))
- A trailing space: “[email protected] ” vs “[email protected]”
- A typo: “[email protected]” vs “[email protected]”
- Copy-paste leftovers: “mailto:[email protected]”
Or do it all in one step
- Drop your .xlsx or .csv file onto the box above.
- TidyRow cleans every email first (spaces, capitals, common typos), then keeps one row per person.
- See how many duplicates were removed, then download.
- Matches by email, or by phone number when there’s no email
- Keeps the first row for each person, in your original order
- Free for up to 100 rows, and your file is never uploaded
Frequently asked questions
Why didn’t Excel remove all my duplicates?
Excel only removes values that match exactly. A trailing space or a typo in an email makes two rows look different. Clean the column first with TRIM and LOWER, or use TidyRow, which does this automatically for contact lists.
Which row does TidyRow keep?
The first one in your file. Later rows with the same email (or phone, if there’s no email) are removed.
Is TidyRow for any kind of data?
It’s built for lists of people: customers, leads, subscribers. For other data, Excel’s Remove Duplicates button is the right tool.