You can use a pivot. Drop your five fields into the Row Fields section.
Chances are, you'll get subtotals. Right-click in each column and select None
for subtotals. Any data you need to drop into Data Items, right click on
these and select Field Settings again. Sounds like you'll want to select
Average to avoid sums and counts. Do it for each column. That should fix that!

"childofthe1980s" wrote:

Hello:

I have exported some inventory data to Excel from my accounting software
program. The data looks good, but it is duplicating. The duplication would
be eliminated, if I could find a way to group the data based on five columns.
(The five columns make up the basic characteristics of each inventory item.)

I tried using pivot tables, but I could not get this to work. The pivot
table was trying to "count" the number of rows and sum up some of the
columns. All I want is to group this data based on these five columns, in
order to eliminate the duplicate data. Perhaps, pivot tables is not the way
to go.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

childofthe1980s