De-duping a mailing list

Anonymous
2017-10-21T04:39:27+00:00

Hi everyone,

I have a spreadsheet consisting of about 150 rows. It contains the full names of the people in Column F and each of the rows have either a “billing address”, “home address”, “work address” or “PO address”. The spreadsheet is sorted by column F (Full name) in alphabetical order so that you can clearly see the duplicate names. In fact, the duplicates in column F were identified in another workbook and copied into the current separate one so that duplicate customer records could be removed in preparation for a mailout.

In most instances there are only two duplicates for any particular customer but in some cases there could be 3, 4 or even 5. The goal of the exercise is to keep the customer row that has a home address as that is the preferable address to send to. If there’s no home address, then keep the billing address. If no billing address, then keep the work address. If no work address keep the PO box address.

My first attempt at this de-duping was to sort by home address, then by billing address, then by work address, then by PO box address. Even though this helped identify which entries had a home address, it still hasn’t solved the problem as it hasn’t de-duped as I would like and as I described in the previous paragraph.

Can anyone tell me if this can be done in excel and if yes, how I would go about it? Or would I would need to get some vba code written?

Would really appreciate any advice.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-10-22T06:24:00+00:00

    Sorry the screenshot below shows what it looks like in B3 but when I click enter, it gives me the error again.

    why does that have $A1 in the formula when the last formula I posted had a $A3?

    see below:

    =IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Home!$A$1:$AQ$61,4,FALSE))

    IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Billing!$A$1:$AQ$118,4,FALSE)),IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Work!$A$1:$AQ$33,4,FALSE)),IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]POBox!$A$1:$AQ$11,4,FALSE)),VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]POBox!$A$1:$AQ$11,4,FALSE),"NO MATCH ANYWHERE"),VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Work!$A$1:$AQ$33,4,FALSE)),VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Billing!$A$1:$AQ$118,4,FALSE)),VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Home!$A$1:$AQ$61,4,FALSE))

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-10-22T06:29:11+00:00

    I think you were looking at the wrong post. I did actually use the one with $A3 and posted a screenshot of the formula in the cell. As I said in that post, it still didn't work and I got the same error.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-10-22T06:37:33+00:00

    we can do it one sheet at a time to test it. please paste this in cell b3:

    =VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Home!$A$1:$AQ$61,1,FALSE)

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-10-22T06:53:16+00:00

    Ok I did that and the value returned was #N/A. Do you know what that means?

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-10-22T06:56:04+00:00

    yes it means the name is not in the home sheet

    try this:

    =VLOOKUP($A3,[test.xlsx]Billing!$A$1:$AQ$61,4,FALSE)

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