Exact duplicates are the safe first pass
Two rows are exact duplicates when every parsed field is equal. That is different from deciding that “A. Smith” and “Alice Smith” are the same person. Fuzzy matching can merge distinct customers, invoices, or products and should require domain-specific keys and human review.
Safe deduplication steps
- Preserve the source export.
- Parse quoted fields with the detected delimiter.
- Compare complete rows, not raw physical lines.
- Keep the first exact occurrence and count each later duplicate.
- Review totals and the repair report before importing the result.
What the free tool changes
The repair removes only exact duplicate parsed rows. It does not guess identities or merge near-matches. It also normalizes headers, equalizes row width, neutralizes formula-like cells, and creates Excel-friendly UTF-8 output with an audit count.