Remove Duplicates and Text to Columns in Grid by Zaweba

Two of the most common clean-up jobs in any spreadsheet are getting rid of repeats and splitting a crowded column apart. Grid by Zaweba has a command for each: Remove Duplicates and Text to Columns. Used together, they turn an untidy export or a merged mailing list into something you can sort, filter and look things up in.

Remove Duplicates

Remove Duplicates deletes rows that repeat, judged by the columns you choose. That choice is the whole skill. Pick every column and only rows that are identical in every field go. Pick just the email column and any row with an email address seen earlier goes, even if the name is spelt differently.

Think about what a duplicate really means for your list. For a mailing list, it's usually the email address. For a stock list, the product code. For a list of orders, perhaps the order number, but certainly not the customer name, since a good customer appears many times. Choosing too few columns removes rows you wanted; choosing too many leaves near-copies behind.

Before you run it, sort the list so the row you'd rather keep comes first, such as the most recent entry. Remove Duplicates keeps the first occurrence and deletes the later ones, so the sort decides which version survives.

Hidden differences can stop two rows matching: a trailing space, different capitals, a number stored as text. If you expect more duplicates than are found, tidy the key column first with TRIM or a case function in a helper column, paste the values back, and run it again.

Text to Columns

Text to Columns splits the contents of one column into several. An export that puts "Surname, First name" in one cell, a column of addresses with commas between the parts, or a pasted list where everything landed in column A can all be separated into proper fields.

Leave enough empty columns to the right before you run it, because the split pieces fill the neighbouring cells and will write over anything already there. Insert a few blank columns first if the sheet is crowded.

Text to Columns is a one-off: the result is plain values, not formulas. If the source data will keep changing and you want the split to follow, the TEXTSPLIT, TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER functions do the same job live. Use the command for a clean-up you'll do once, and the functions for a sheet you'll keep feeding.

A typical clean-up

Say you've combined two lists of club members. Paste them one under the other. Run Text to Columns on the name column to split first and last names. Trim the email column, sort by date joined with the newest first, and run Remove Duplicates on email. Turn the result into a table, freeze the header row, and you have a single clean list ready for a mail merge or a membership report.

If you've connected your own AI account, Clean up data on the AI menu can also trim spaces, fix case, standardise dates and split two-part columns, with the result previewed before anything is written.

Staying safe

Both commands change data in place. Keep a copy of the original on another sheet before a big clean-up, or at least check the result straight away so a single Undo will reverse it. Grid keeps 100 undo steps, so a mistake caught early costs nothing.

Remove Duplicates and Text to Columns are simple tools, but in Grid by Zaweba they're often the first two steps in making imported data usable.