Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it appears that you are not interested in
finding duplicate entries, but only those entries that are duplicate for the
first specific number of characters. In your examples that's 17 characters.
In other words, not counting what you refer to as the extension. Is that
right?
You would need VBA for that but you don't say what you want done with
entries that are found to be duplicates (for the first 17 characters). Do
you want duplicates highlighted? Moved? Copied? All the entries that are
duplicates or do you want to leave one? HTH Otto
"K. Gwynn" wrote in message
...
Before posting this message I read through all the posts for finding and
counting unique entries and tried most of the responses and still have not
found a solution that works for my situation.

So here goes:

I have a spreadsheet with 700+ entries. The records I need to sort on look
like this:
CMMI2_CM_GP2_08_G
CMMI2_CM_GP2_09_P
CMMI2_CM_GP2_09_P
CMMI2_CM_GP2_09_P_PD_PP_H
CMMI2_CM_GP2_10_P_ND_PP_H

In the example above the duplicates are
CMMI2_CM_GP2_09_P
CMMI2_CM_GP2_09_P
CMMI2_CM_GP2_09_P_PD_PP_H

So when I've tried using Advanced Filter, the two that look exactly the
same
are filtered out, but the one with the "PD_PP_H" extension is not.

[No, that extension cannot be filtered out ahead of time and yes, it is
important to the data set].

Now what? Thanks in advance for any suggestions and help.