Find the Difference between Two Lists

If you've got two lists or table to compare, most of the time you can use the equal sign to compare the cell values. But sometimes there are complications like having more than one value, values (text or string values) are separated by delimiters (e.g., commas, semicolons, etc.) or the values are not in the "correct" order. Doing the simple cell to cell comparison is not applicable and that's when you can use Power Query to help compare values.

Google Sheets - Finding Duplicate Values

When you get a table or list from others or some systems, you might get duplicate records. If you wanted to find those duplicates whether it be in a one column table or a multiple column table, it's fairly easy to do within Google sheets. I'll show a couple of ways this can be done with formulas and with a Pivot Table. Also if you wanted to just delete duplicate records ( and didn't want to bother with the analysis of which records is a duplicate), closer to the end of the video I'll show the command to do this quickly.

Extract Values from Column based on Another Column

There are times when you get data from someone that's not in a spreadsheet but looks like it came from one. The file you get may be a text file, but it looks like it's almost in some table format and had some calculations. You'd want to take the data or content from the file and do further analysis, so that would involve putting it into Excel. If it was a small file, it's a simple copy and paste, but if it was a large file it would take a long time to copy/paste all that data. You can actually bring it into a spreadsheet but you'd first need to see if there were some patterns. Hopefully if someone gave you a text file that seems to have calculations in it, the file would have come from some application that did the calculation and uniformly had the output in some repeating format (like some dash marker to indicate a total row was next) then you could extract data based on a previous row. This video will show how to use values from one row to find a pattern, use some conditions to compare and extract it to make a new column to help make a proper table to support further analysis