How to List Unique Values with UNIQUE in Excel

Strip duplicates into a live list, find entries that appear only once, and list distinct names for one source.

You will learn to

• List each value once with UNIQUE
• Find values that occur exactly once
• De-duplicate a filtered list

How it works

UNIQUE(array, [by_col], [exactly_once]) returns each distinct value from a range, in the order it first appears. =UNIQUE(B2:B11) turns a column of countries with repeats into a clean list. Unlike Remove Duplicates, the source stays intact and the list updates when data changes. UNIQUE ignores letter case.

Set the third argument to TRUE to keep only values that appear exactly once — useful for spotting one-time customers or unmatched records. Wrap FILTER inside UNIQUE to de-duplicate just part of the data, such as attendees who came from one marketing source.

=UNIQUE(A2:A11,FALSE,TRUE)