One of the infrequent pleasures of being a data geek like me is that one does occasionally stumble across little-known yet incredibly useful features in a tool that you use day-in, day-out. Today this happened to me and the feature is Excel’s ability to highlight dupicate rows in a worksheet. Check this out:

Notice that I have got some data in my worksheet that contains duplicated values and simply by selecting Conditional Formatting->Highlight Cells Rules->Duplicate Values… Excel will highlight (shown here in red) which rows are duplicated. It seem such a simple thing but when you’re working on a data integration project and the data that is being sent is of, well, let’s say dubious quality features like this are worth their weight in gold. I tweeted about this and it happened to catch a few people’s attention so I figured it might be worth blogging too. Note that I am using Excel 2013 but I happen to know that the feature exists in Excel 2010 and possibly in earlier versions too.

Have a great weekend!

@Jamiet