Unique/Primary Keys in Excel Tables

Notes on how to prevent, find, highlight, report and remove duplicate rows in Excel.

In a relational database primary keys prevent adding duplicate values to a table. This can be done in Excel as well with custom validation. Also, Excel has lots of support for finding, highlighting, extracting and filtering duplicate rows.

• Create PRIMARY KEY using Excel Custom Validation to Prevent Duplicate Entries in a Excel Cell.

• Highlight Duplicates
  Home > Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells Rules > Duplicate Values.

• Excel’s Unique function finds and selects unique values.

• See Remove Duplicates on the Data tab.

• VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros can do all of the above and more.

Related Pages

• Data validation to allow only unique entries and disallow duplicates

  • https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/excel-data-validation-custom-formula/

  • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29923904/primary-key-constraint-and-auto-increment-in-an-excel-file-database

  • https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/apply-data-validation-to-cells-29fecbcc-d1b9-42c1-9d76-eff3ce5f7249

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-remove-duplicates-00e35bea-b46a-4d5d-b28e-66a552dc138d?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/unique-function-c5ab87fd-30a3-4ce9-9d1a-40204fb85e1e

• https://www.automateexcel.com/how-to/distinct-unique-values/

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/library-reference/concepts/getting-started-with-vba-in-office

  • https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/excel