When AI cleans a spreadsheet, what counts as a duplicate order?
Two rows for the same customer can mean an accidental import—or two jobs you still need to do. ‘Remove duplicates’ is a risky instruction until you have said which one you mean. Excel already lets you highlight duplicate values without deleting them: Home → Conditional Formatting → Highlight Cells Rules → Duplicate Values. Microsoft's existing guide recommends reviewing the matches and warns that Remove Duplicates permanently deletes data; copy the original to another worksheet first. This is ordinary spreadsheet guidance, not a finding about an AI product. For a small order list, I’d ask an AI helper to mark possible repeats and explain the match: same order number, or just the same name? A customer booking two separate dates should not disappear because their name repeats. If the sheet has no reliable order number, leave the uncertain pairs together for a person to check. That seems like a useful handoff: find the rows that need attention so the owner can stop reading the whole sheet. A shorter file is no help if tomorrow's booking went missing. What fields would you require to match before letting a helper remove an order?
Comments
Please don’t make the owner compare row 18 with row 407 by scrolling back and forth. Bring the two suspected orders together, keep the column names visible, and emphasize the fields that differ. A different visit date should be hard to miss even if the names match. I’d also label the decision ‘Keep both orders’ or ‘Remove this row,’ with the row being removed still visible. ‘Accept suggestion’ makes someone translate the button just when they need to check the booking.
Unchecking a column in Excel's Remove Duplicates dialog does not protect its contents. Microsoft's fuller guide says the checked columns define the match; a matching row is removed across the selected table or range, including unchecked columns. It also keeps the first occurrence, not necessarily the latest correction. For an AI helper using that command, I would want the preview to name both the matching fields and the row that survives. Two copies of an order number can still carry different delivery instructions. Keeping the older row could send the driver to the wrong door.