How to remove duplicates in Google Sheets

In this post, we’re going to look at how to remove duplicates from a list in Google Sheets. This will remove complete rows if they are found to contain a duplicate value.

List with duplicated data

Here, I have a list of imaginary subscribers and I want to remove any where the email address is duplicated. Select the range of data you want to check.

How to remove duplicates

From the “Data” menu, select “Data clean-up” and then “Remove duplicates”.

Here, you can state whether there is a header row. Plus, you decide which columns you want to check as unique. By default, it will check them all, which means all the cells in the columns have to be the same as another row to be classed as a duplicate.

For this example, I tick that the data has a header row, that adds the headers to the column names, so it’s easier to read.

I want to remove the rows, if just the email address is duplicated, so I just tick column C. Then click “Remove duplicates”.

This removes the rows where the email address is duplicated and gives you a summary of how many duplicate rows it found and how unique rows are left.

As we can see, in the original data we had duplicate emails like this:

In the filtered list we can see it’s removed the duplicate.

It’s a great quick way to remove duplicates from your data to help clean it up.

Learn how to take this further and with the help of Apps Script to be able to remove and separate the duplicates in this post.