I'd start by looking for leading/trailing spaces.

And do you really have text in all those cells--or could they be dates just
formatted to show the month?

Rob B wrote:

Dave, Many thanks for that. THe years just faded away! However, I have a
similar probelm with the month column:

January 2036
February 2531
March 3611
May 7211
June 16183
July 15364
August 21241
September 11588
October 7469
November 2825
December 6072
20
April 4021
Annual 10865
August 20
Autumn 70
June 6

I tried using this below, but perhaps didn't understand the formula. could
you expnad on how to do this please?

If you want to change to text, I'd insert a helper column and use:

=a2&""

drag down and copy|paste special|values over the original range. Then delete
the helper column.

If you still end up with duplicates, watch out for leading/trailing spaces in
your data.

Many thanks, Rob.

--

Dave Peterson