Do you have a new mailing list you'd like to incorporate into your new Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)? Or perhaps a combined list of email address from your past workshops … just sitting there waiting for someone to go through them all? If so, you may be procrastinating because you just don't know how to tackle all of those duplicates. In as few as five quick steps you can get a jump on cleaning up your list by using MS Excel.
Caveat, you will be eliminating data from your spreadsheet. Before you begin, create a copy of your data for backup purposes.
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Select the rows/data you want to check. TIP: If you are in the data, you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+8 (on the keyboard, not the number pad).
- Click the Data tab on the menu bar (aka ribbon).
- Click Remove Duplicates in the Data Tools group. Excel displays Remove Duplicates dialog box.
- "My data has headers" should be checked. Click to Unselect all columns then click the box next to the column heading you are ready to check for duplicates, i.e., Address or Email.
- Click OK and you've completed your mission!
If you are working on a list of addresses, you may need to resort by zip code and address then visually scan your list for remaining duplicate addresses that may have slight variations due to abbreviations.
Have a great week!
- April