Remove Duplicates Not Working — Extra Spaces

Why identical-looking text doesn't match

Remove Duplicates does an exact comparison of what's actually stored in the cell, not what you see. A value with a trailing space is a different string from the same value without one, even though both display exactly the same in the cell and in the formula bar unless you click in and look carefully at the cursor position after the last visible character.

Where the extra spaces usually come from

Data pasted from another system, a website, or a PDF-to-text conversion frequently carries stray whitespace: a trailing space left over from a fixed-width export, doubled spaces where a name and title were joined, or non-breaking spaces (a distinct character, code 160, used in web page layouts) that look completely normal but aren't the plain space character Excel expects.

Fixing it before you dedupe

Add a helper column with =TRIM(A2) to strip leading/trailing spaces and collapse internal double-spaces to single. If TRIM alone doesn't fix it, the culprit is likely a non-breaking space — use =SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(160)," ") first, then TRIM. Convert the helper column to values (copy, then Paste Special → Values), delete the original column, and run Remove Duplicates on the cleaned data.

Checking without the manual cleanup

Upload your file below — the tool normalizes whitespace before comparing, so you can see which rows are true duplicates once stray spaces are accounted for, without building and re-checking a helper column by hand first.