

Of course, you could also use a different approach that maintains the original data and simply extracts the information that represents the latest inspection dates. Thus, if you want to maintain the older information for historical purposes, you may want to perform the steps on a duplicate of your data. Understand that if you follow these steps it is destructive to your data-when completed, the older data is completely removed from your worksheet. Excel removes the duplicates and leaves only those records that contain the latest (most recent) inspection date. Make sure that the only field selected in the dialog box is the one that contains the facility.Excel displays the Remove Duplicates dialog box. With the Data tab of the ribbon still visible, click the Remove Duplicates tool in the Data Tools group.Using the controls in the dialog box, indicate that you want to sort first by facility (A to Z or Smallest to Largest, whichever is appropriate) and then by inspection date (Newest to Oldest).To use the tool for this particular purpose, follow these steps: Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to use Excel's remove duplicate tool. The result would be one row per facility, showing the latest inspection date. Gary needs to delete all the rows for each facility with the exception of the latest inspection date. This results in multiple rows for each facility, one row per inspection. Gary is using an Excel worksheet to maintain of list of facilities that his company inspects, along with the dates of all the prior inspections of those facilities.
