Excel can help you find duplicates

The only problem with this method is that it will only show you exact duplicates. But if you have two identical POI's with slightly different coordinates this method will not work.

You may want to check out Extra_POI_Editor. It is free and will allow you to find duplicate POI's based on distance.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/21156

I can make use of this in ways outside of poi creation as well...much appreciated

@ timlitw:

Thanks for the Excel 2003 tip. I use Gadget Guy's method to find POI duplicates, and it works like a charm.   You can also specify the minimum distance for two POIs to be considered as duplicates by EPE.

For Excel 2007 users, here's how to highlight duplicate cells:
       http://tinyurl.com/cmjmlj

Actually, using Excel this way would be a very poor use of the tool. As already pointed out, it only finds exact duplicates. Excel is quite capable of the math needed to find true duplicates where the coordinated are not exact matches, but I've never seen anyone put in the effort to write the script to do it. Such a script could well be written, but there seems no reason to do so.

I've been following the discussion about turboccc's Extra_POI_Editor. I have not played with the software yet, but I believe it will find duplicates, and that is true duplicates within X distance of each other (such as .1 mile), and not need exact matches in the lat and long columns, and will not accidentally show a match when one coordinate matches exactly but the other is significantly off.

It's worth mentioning that .cvs files are not actually Excel files, they are comma delimited text files that Excel and other spread sheet programs happen to be able to read and write. If you just want to read a csv file you can open it in almost any text editor, and there are many command line based sort programs that will sort lines of text bases on the data in certain columns that would quickly sort a CSV file for you to let you scan it for these kinds of duplicates just as well as Excel could do. And most are free. Also, there are free spread sheet programs that will read and write .csv files including the .csv POI files found here, such as the popular one found at www.openoffice.org. A script could also be written for this spread sheet to compute the actual distance between the points in a POI set, allowing you to see how close any two POIs are in actual miles, kilometers, or even feet, and flag those below a stated threshold. There is no reason to hype an expensive Microsoft product that can be used to do a job poorly when there are better tools out there and free tools that can do the same job.

Check out MM's updated avatar! Looks like she is spending some time in the garden. I like the hat. That's what my wife and I were doing today, digging in the dirt planting new flowers.

Gary,
Better look again, thats not MM!

Actuall I modified MM's avatar as a joke. Here's the thread where it came up http://www.poi-factory.com/node/2868

I'm leaving it up until MM can see it

Now that I know what the free tools can do and do easier they are great. But since the files I have to edit at work don't have a common format and special tools, I'll have to keep using my excel tricks to speed up my text manipulation at work.