I have a list of species living in Ponte Vedra which I downloaded from GBIF. While browsing it in Excel, I noticed some duplicates. Why is that? I certainly don’t want duplicate pages here in WordPress. I needed to find and get rid of the extras.
Upon closer inspection, I saw that the duplicates were not identical. For example, in the screenshot above, you can see that three of the duplicates actually have different scientific names. This looks like lingering gray areas in the classification. Luckily, the number of sightings is insignificant enough to delete one of the species from my published set.
How can I find ALL the duplicates in my species list? It’s shockingly easy. I selected the Species column. I clicked Conditional Formatting. I selected Highlight Cell Rules and chose Duplicate Values to be highlighted.
Easy peasy.
Now I will skim through and delete the less-reported of each of the duplicates.
Guess what? Every time I delete one, the highlight disappears on the remaining one. No longer a twin.
Easy peasy.