Removes rows from your file
Dedupe & Merge
Find the duplicates, decide which copy wins, and keep the receipt. Excel tells you “482 duplicate values found and removed” and nothing else — you cannot see what left, you cannot get it back, and you cannot show anyone what happened.
Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account
You get the deduped file, a separate file containing every removed row, and the report — all beside each other, with your original untouched.
What you can do
What people use it for — Dedupe & Merge
The jobs this one actually gets opened for.
- Deduping a customer list where the same company is spelled four different ways.
- Proving to somebody which rows a dedupe removed, and what each one matched.
- Merging two exports so the record with the phone number and the record with the email become one.
- Finding duplicates in a file far too large for Excel to open at all.
- Deciding which duplicate survives by completeness rather than by whichever came first.
What it does
Everything Dedupe & Merge handles
Everything this tool handles, and how it handles it.
Exact and normalized matching
Match on every column or on a key you choose. Normalized matching case-folds, collapses whitespace and strips punctuation, so “Acme Corp.” and “ACME Corp” stop being two customers — the single highest-value default.
Fuzzy matching, reviewed as groups
Jaro-Winkler or Levenshtein above a threshold you set, on the columns you choose, with a blocking key so it stays fast on a large file. Clusters are presented as groups to confirm, not as an endless list of pairs.
A removals report, every time
Every dropped row, the row it lost to, and why. This is the whole difference from Excel's button, and it is what makes a dedupe something you can defend afterwards.
You choose which copy wins
First seen, last seen, most complete (fewest nulls), or the highest or lowest value in a column you name. “Whichever one Excel happened to reach first” is not a rule.
Merge instead of dropping
Rather than discarding the losers, coalesce the group: take the first non-null value for each field. This is the “the CRM has the phone number and the export has the email” case, and it turns a dedupe from a cleanup into a gain.
On the file that most needs it
The file where duplicates matter most is usually the one Excel has already refused to open. Size is not a constraint here.
How it works
From your file to the result
- 1
Open the file and pick the key
All columns, or the ones that define a duplicate for your data. DataTray can suggest candidate keys from the file's own column statistics.
- 2
Choose how strictly to match
Exact, normalized, or fuzzy with a threshold. Preview the clusters before anything is written.
- 3
Set the keep rule and run
Decide which row survives — or switch to merge mode and coalesce the group instead. Out comes the deduped file, the removals file, and the report.
Under the hood
Formats, limits and defaults
Nothing is removed silently, and nothing is removed from your original.
- Match modes
- Exact · normalized exact · fuzzy (Jaro-Winkler or Levenshtein)
- Keep rules
- First seen · last seen · most complete · highest or lowest in a chosen column
- Merge mode
- Coalesce a group field by field, taking the first non-null value
- Outputs
- Deduped file in any supported format · a removals file · the Deduplication Report (HTML + .xlsx)
- Formats
- CSV, TSV, Excel, Parquet, JSON and the rest of the converter's list
Functionally this is a cleaning operation and it could have lived inside Clean & Anonymize. It has its own front door because removing duplicates is the single thing this audience most often comes looking for, and burying it a level down would be the wrong trade.
The rest of the belt
The other four tools
Questions
Dedupe & Merge, answered
Get it free — Dedupe & Merge
Dedupe & Merge ships in DataTray, free for Windows 10 and 11. No account, and nothing uploads.
Windows 10/11 (x64) · Free · No account