How do I remove a large number of duplicate entries?

[Dan J Clark]

How do I bulk remove a large number of duplicate items?

I'd think there would be a "remove duplicates" or "remove dupes" or "delete dupes" or "delete duplicates" or "delete duplicate tasks" or "remove duplicate tasks" or "dedupe" or "deduplicate" menu option somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. (Just helping out future searchers with that long list of possibilities there. :-)

I've used Outlook 2010 with ODIR - Outlook Duplicate Items Remover 1.4.4 - http://www.vaita.com/odir.asp - before to do stuff like this in Outlook, guessing that might work if set up in combination with MLO's Outlook sync, but I don't use Outlook any more, and don't have it installed on my computer at the moment, so that would not be my preferred solution.

IMHO there should always be a deduplication feature if a sync or import items into existing document feature exists in a piece of software. I really hope there is one in MLO I'm missing, or some little tool to do it provided by the company.

How exactly I've ended up with 300 duplicate entries will be the topic of my next post...

[Dan J Clark]

I think I just found a way for this kind of duplicates, e.g. all made at once do to an import. A problem with it is that it also deletes non-dupes introduced by the import.

(0) Go to the properties of the dupes and note the exact created date of the newer one. This is under Properties -> Task Statistics -> Created:

(1) Go to To-Do tab -> Outline -> All tasks

(2) Go to Edit > Text filter...

(3) Expand "Advanced", then click the "Add advanced" checkbox

(4) Click "Setup..." button

(5) Click "Add rule"

(6) Make a rule with "CreatedDateTime" you found in (0)

(7) Run the rule, then select and delete all the results.

Would still be nice to know if there is a better way.

[Joel Azaria]

Not that I've tried but and idea is to export the file either to .xml or to tab delimited and then use an external tool to find and clean the dupes.  A quick google search shows that you should be able to find something for xml and tab delimited can be opened in Excel where I'm sure you can find a dupes remover for Excel.

hth.