It’s inevitable: When you’re working with a large dataset, there are bound to be a few duplicates that sneak their way in.

Rather than getting bleary-eyed and frustrated by scrolling through that entire spreadsheet and looking for them yourself, Excel can do all of that legwork for you and remove duplicates with the click of a button.

Here’s how you do it:

• Highlight the entire data set.
• Hit the “Data” tab.
• Click the “Remove Duplicates” button.
• Select what columns you want Excel to find duplicates in.
• Hit “OK.”

IMPORTANT NOTE: Be careful that you choose enough qualifiers to weed out the true duplicates. For example, if I had just selected to remove duplicates in only Column A above (meaning Excel would’ve looked for duplicates of “Oprah”), I would’ve deleted one Oprah that indeed had the same address, but one that had a different last name and address altogether (a different Oprah entirely!)

The bottom line is, utilize enough information so that you’re removing rows that are true identical copies of each other—and don’t just share one similar value!