How to Highlight Duplicates in Microsoft Excel

Using conditional formatting one may easily show duplicate values in any chosen range of data. Find all duplicate values, and highlight any values that appear more than once.

=COUNTIF(A:A,A2)>1

This is the meat, and here is how:

  • Highlight the cell to work on.
  • Click Format > Conditional Formatting
  • Set Formula Is
  • Enter the formula above, replacing the ranges as follows:
    • (A:A means that it will look inside the entire A range. Replace this with your own range, e.g. B3:B5 or CC:CC
    • ,A2) means to count how many times the value in A2 appears in the designated range. This needs to match the cell you are currently working on.
  • Then set the format you want to see when the count of identical values existing in the range is greater than one. This value can be altered to a higher number in order to highlight cells that have more than two duplicates, e.g. change it to be >5 to highlight the cell when at least 5 cells have the same value as the current cell, including this cell itself.
  • Copy the formula only to other cells in the range. To do this, copy the current cell, then Paste Special and choose Formulas and paste into the other cells in the range.

An excellent tutorial is at MREXCEL.COM, and thanks to that site for this knowledge and info.

Posted under Excel, Microsoft, Office

This post was written by Content Curator on November 16, 2009

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Update Microsoft Windows Defender manually

Microsoft makes manual download of update files easily accessible at this link:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=70631

This will download a file called Mpas-fe.exe
Try to save the file in a location that you can get to easily with a command prompt. (ie. C:\ )
Then, open a command prompt and run the program using the -q switch. It looks like this:

Mpas-fe.exe -q

The program will run quickly, and won’t give you any kind of confirmation that it has run or finished.

Open the Microsoft Windows Defender window to see what date your definition files have. This is how you can be sure that the update was successful.

IMPORTANT: The above info applies ONLY to 32-bit Operating Systems. For those of you using 64-bit platforms, see the full scoop here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923159 

Posted under Freeware, Microsoft