I use compuhost. There is a great feature in it that allows you to print out song lists without duplicates. Now of course the manus are not very good at getting the song titles exactly correct. Using periods and hyphens in the incorrect spot or not using them or using them. Or using diffferent names such as Tom Petty vs. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers vs Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and,,,,, well you all know the dilemma. Don't forget "The Beatles" vs "Beatles".
So I have painstakingly gone through my songs on FastTracks and fixed everything I can see. It really makes the book look so much more professional and is less confusing. Oh did I add Grease vs Olivia and John vs John and Olivia,,,,?

Now what I need is to be able to eliminate duplicates in my exported excel list so I can post it on my web site without dupes and also know exactly how many songs I have not counting dupes and vocals. I don't want to do it by hand.
I'm pretty handy with excel but not THAT handy. Anyone know of a feature in excel that will allow me to choose a specific column to delete dupes? Of course I have to complicate it a bit as I don't want to delete a dupe song name if it is offered by two different performers such as Crazy, Blue, Tainted Love, etc. What say ye?

Petty, Tom & The Heartbreakers

To me, the most important thing is being consistant. Even that can be difficult at times.

mcky, will it take out the vocals records as well?

When you use last name first, do you do Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers when he is with the Heartbreakers and Petty, Tom when he solos? How about when it comes to something like The Charlie Daniels Band? Is it, Daniels, Charlie Band, The? Or Charlie Daniels Band, The. Then if he solos he is under Daniels, Charlie?

I get so inconsistant with this that I want to switch to First Name First just to eliminate the confusion and put the soloists and the solo plus band all in one place. But some argue that people just don't look up by first name. Yet Chartbuster lists their artists via first name. first Aye aye aye.

Micky--does your program let you pick which dupes to eliminate? Like when you replace an SGB with a Zoom or something?

It sounds like a great convenience to have it standardize the artists as I am still finding we have duplicates because of the "&" vs "and" thing causing the titles to be alphabetized differently. Or even N*S*y*N*C* or however it goes vs. NSYNC.

get primopdf and you can use the list that Fast Tracks puts out in PDF format. It acts like a printer you just assign it as the printer you want to use. www.primopdf.com

When you use last name first, do you do Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers when he is with the Heartbreakers and Petty, Tom when he solos? How about when it comes to something like The Charlie Daniels Band? Is it, Daniels, Charlie Band, The? Or Charlie Daniels Band, The. Then if he solos he is under Daniels, Charlie?

In Excel 2007
Use Remove Duplicates icon
This method is highly destructive! Make a copy of your dataset before you do this!

1. Copy your range of data to a blank section of the worksheet
2. Select a cell in your data set.
3. From the Data ribbon, choose Remove Duplicates.
4. The Remove Duplicates dialog will give you a list of columns. Choose the columns which should be considered. For example, if you needed to remove records where both the artist and song title were identical, check the box for both fields.
5. Click OK.

Excel will delete records from your dataset. It will report that n duplicates were removed and nn records remain.