Friday, December 23, 2022

Excel Trick: The UNIQUE Function

Yesterday I found myself spending more time in my Excel sheet with 32,000 rows and 44 columns. One of the columns listed video games. As there are a finite number of video games that is much less than 32,000, I wanted to get a list of them.

I did a quick search on the Internet and came across a large number of ways to list out all the unique values in a column. Some seemed overly complex. I typed one formula into the spreadsheet cell only to have it do nothing. Eventually I tried Microsoft's site and discovered the UNIQUE function. It is as simple as it sounds. You put it in a cell with the range of cells that contain your values and it creates a list with each unique value filling that column. It is as simple as using the following fromula:

=UNIQUE(B2:B32000)

If I put the formula in cell C2, all of the unique video game names will populate the C-column. It worked pretty well and I then had a list of all 800+ video games in the spreadsheet.

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