How to update duplicate items when importing Excel to SharePoint list | Excel Import - BoostSolutions App, Saas & Software for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint

How to update duplicate items when importing Excel to SharePoint list?

When you import data from Excel into a SharePoint list, you may encounter one question, how to deal with the duplicate items or rows, update duplicate items or skip duplicate items? BoostSolutions’ Excel Import provides the option to help you to deal with this issue.

In this article, we will demonstrate how to update the duplicate items when importing data from Excel to a SharePoint list.

WHAT YOU'LL GET

Select "Update duplicate records" option to update the duplicated items in the SharePoint list

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

Excel Import

The sample data we use for this case

And there is an Excel file named as Customer, the Excel file contains these customer information as following.

Update duplicate items when importing Excel to SharePoint list

Firstly, download the trial version of Excel Import and install it to your SharePoint server.
Navigate to the Customers list.
Under ITEMS tab, click Import Spreadsheet command in Import & Export group.
When the Import from Spreadsheet dialog appears, click Browse… button to choose the Customer file already prepared.
Click Next button.
In the Import from Spreadsheet dialog, configure these import options.

In the Sheet section, select sheet Customers to import. And select Skip header row in Excel option to skip importing header row into the list.

In the Column Mapping section, select these columns (Customer, Contact, Industry, Contact Email and Country) to import to the list.

In the Filter section, because we want to import all rows into the list, unselect Import from row [] to [] option.

In the Import Options section, unselect Check duplicate records when importing option.
Keep other settings as default and click Import button.
After importing process finished, click Close button to exit.
Then in the Customers list, you will find that the items of Excel spreadsheet are imported into the list as following.
In the Excel spreadsheet Customer, modify the row CAST as following.
Under ITEMS tab, click Import Spreadsheet command in Import & Export group.
When the Import from Spreadsheet dialog appears, click Browse… button to choose the Customer file already prepared.
Click Next button.
When the Import from Spreadsheet dialog appears, in the Import Options section, select Check duplicate records when importing option. Then specify Customer as key and select Update duplicate records option.

Duplicate records can exist in both SharePoint list and Excel Sheet. In order to duplicate records, a Key has to be specified to identify duplicate records. A key column is one that uniquely identifies records between Excel and SharePoint list (like an ID column).

Duplicate records will be filtered first. Secondly, Excel Import will replace information found in the duplicate records in SharePoint using the corresponding information from the Excel spreadsheet. Finally, the remaining data will be regarded as new records and imported accordingly.
Keep other settings as default and click Import button.
After importing process finished, click Close button to exit.
Then in the Customers list, you will find that the modified item of Excel spreadsheet has been updated in the SharePoint list as following.