How to highlight duplicates in Google Sheets
Conditional formatting formulas that colour every duplicate, or only the second and later occurrences.
- Select the range, e.g.
A2:D. - Format → Conditional formatting → Format cells if… → Custom formula is.
- Paste one of these formulas and pick a colour.
Highlight all rows whose value in column A appears more than once:
=COUNTIF($A$2:$A,$A2)>1Highlight only the repeats (the first occurrence stays white):
=COUNTIF($A$2:$A2,$A2)>1COUNTIF ignores upper/lower case but not extra spaces: Ann and Ann are different. Clean with TRIM first, or use CleanRows (ignores spaces by default).
Do it in two clicks inside Google Sheets. CleanRows highlights, deletes or moves duplicates by the columns you pick, ignores case/spaces/accents and compares two sheets. Free up to 1,000 rows. Get CleanRows →
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