Extracting data from excell

[witchdoc]

I am trying to develop a spreadsheet to find instances where our accounting department might have double paid an invoice. I have dumped raw accounting data to a spreadsheet, including payment amounts, dates, etc. Currently, I sort the data by payment amount, and look for duplicate transactions with the same pay amount. This is still a labor intensive task. Is there an easy way to find and print only the rows that have identical pay amounts?

 

[mirekp]

I will recommend the next process.
- sort the spreadsheet according the payment amount (Data->Sort)
- add new column and in this column compare the payment amount in previous and current line. Something like =IF(C5=C6;1;0)
- use the AutoFilter function (Data->Filter->AutoFilter) for filtering duplicate records

Mirekp

http://www.mitcalc.com

Mechanical calculations

 

[paron]

Or, move away from trying to use Excel as a database, which it isn't.

In a database it is "duck soup" to find duplicates (which is ok), or prevent them (which is probably better). Moreover, databases are made to be used by several users, and it's easy to set up various levels of capability for user roles (one can look, but not change anything, another can look AND change the records, another can't even look.)

And MySQL (and several others) are free (or very reasonable for commercial applications.) What less could you ask?

Ron

 

[joerd]

Similar to Mirekp's solution, but without the sorting:
in an empty column, enter the following formula
[tt]=COUNTIF($B:$B,B3)[/tt]
(assuming that the payment amounts are in column B, starting at row 3, change as needed)
Then copy the formula down as far as needed. This will count each occurrence of a payment amount. A duplicate amount will show up as a 2 (or 3 or more). You can then search or filter this list.
Come to think of it, you could also use a pivot table to analyze the data (see the help and the pivot table wizard), which may not be quicker in this case ;-)

Cheers,
Joerd

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