Remove duplicate text in cell

**jboomer** · 11-10-2009, 01:36 PM

i have a cell in excell that has a string of txt, more like a paragraph. and i want to serch through the string of txt in the cell to make sure there are no duplicates. How would i go about doing this? Sample cell A2, has the the txt "see the dog run. See the dog run. See the dog run." and i want to erase all but the first instance. How would i do that?

**JBeaucaire** · 11-10-2009, 01:46 PM

Trying to do that is going to open up a maintenance nightmare. There's thousands of variables, right?

Better would be to fix the process that ended up putting duplicated values into that cell. How did they get there? Can that process be tweaked to eliminate duplicates as they occur?

Can you provide more info regarding where the dupes come from and how they get there? Can you post up a usable sample worksheet?

Click GO ADVANCED and use the paperclip icon to post up your workbook.

**jboomer** · 11-10-2009, 02:19 PM

I've fixed the issue with what caused the duplicates but now i just need to scrub the data to remove the excess txt.

**jboomer** · 11-10-2009, 02:40 PM

Here is workbook with just the colum with the txt.

**martindwilson** · 11-10-2009, 02:43 PM

what defines excess text?
all i can see is loads of cells with catalogue descriptions what do you expect the result to be?

**JBeaucaire** · 11-10-2009, 03:51 PM

No way, man. Every cell completely different. Even if you tried to construct a loop to find duplicate strings and match them, the macro would really be in trouble trying to know the string "contemporary design" is not the entire string to remove duplicates of...or "contemporary design" might be used differently in different sentences and would get deleted anyway.

If you've fished the duplication error at the source...have the source re-issue this data now, for you.

**jboomer** · 11-10-2009, 03:57 PM

If you read through the descriptions it repeats the txt If you search for "The "Piermont" bedroom" you will see what i mean it's a fairly short desription that repeats liek 5 times. I have figured out that when it repeats it takes the first couple of words and it always where there is a "." followed by a lower case word, but then the rest of it repeats.