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An ops analyst's "duplicate customer" highlight rule keeps missing dupes. Their formula in B2 was:
=IF(COUNTIF($A$2:$A$13, A2) > 1, "Duplicate", "Unique")
Eyeballing column A you can see Acme, Acme (trailing space), and Acme (leading space) — all the same company entered three different ways across three different intake forms. But COUNTIF treats whitespace-different strings as distinct, so each variant returns count 1 and gets flagged Unique.
The fix: normalize both sides of the comparison with TRIM inside a SUMPRODUCT, since COUNTIF can't take a function-transformed range as its criteria_range:
=SUMPRODUCT((TRIM($A$2:$A$13) = TRIM(A2)) * 1)
This builds an array where each element is 1 if the trimmed names match, 0 otherwise; SUMPRODUCT sums to give the post-normalization count.
The match is case-sensitive — only whitespace differences need to be neutralized for this dataset. (If a real intake form also produced acme/ACME variants, you'd wrap each operand in LOWER as well: SUMPRODUCT((LOWER(TRIM($A$2:$A$13)) = LOWER(TRIM(A2))) * 1).)
Your task:
"Duplicate" if the trimmed name appears more than once, "Unique" otherwise.Graded cells: B2 (Acme → Duplicate, 4 variants exist), B6 (Soylent → Unique, only one), B8 (Initech → Duplicate, 2 variants).