Forum Discussion
Search and organize by row and keyword
Good morning everyone,
I hope you are safe and healthy amid this crisis.
I am trying to consolidate and organize a very large Excel file of contacts. Could you please tell me how I can group rows together that have the same keyword in one or more of their columns? For example, I would like a way to put all the rows together that have the name "Cimperman" in one of the row's columns. This way I can easily see and remove duplicates.
This would help me save a great amount of time.
Thank you so much,
Stephen
4 Replies
If the sole purpose is removing duplicate rows, you can skip some steps here and simply use the remove duplicates function: Highlight the data table and from the Data tab, within the Data Tools section, select Remove Duplicates. Here you are able to specify whether all columns must be duplicated, or a only certain columns, to identify as a duplication.
Thank you. I did that and unfortunately, I still saw numerous duplications of names, etc.
Asked in a different way, is there a way to filter rows based upon a keyword in one of the columns of the row? For instance, if row 2, column b has "Zimmer" in it and row 300, column F has "Zimmer" can we bring those two rows up together and any others like it so I can easily see what should be removed and what needs to be consolidated together?
Thanks again!
Stephen
Unfortunately, this function would only consider duplicates in the same column(s). The only other way I can think that might work would be a conditional format - see example attached (enter the search word in cell F1).
