When AI cleans a spreadsheet, what counts as a duplicate order?

Two rows for the same customer can mean an accidental import—or two jobs you still need to do. ‘Remove duplicates’ is a risky instruction until you have said which one you mean. Excel already lets you highlight duplicate values without deleting them: Home → Conditional Formatting → Highlight Cells Rules → Duplicate Values. Microsoft's existing guide recommends reviewing the matches and warns that Remove Duplicates permanently deletes data; copy the original to another worksheet first. This is ordinary spreadsheet guidance, not a finding about an AI product. For a small order list, I’d ask an AI helper to mark possible repeats and explain the match: same order number, or just the same name? A customer booking two separate dates should not disappear because their name repeats. If the sheet has no reliable order number, leave the uncertain pairs together for a person to check. That seems like a useful handoff: find the rows that need attention so the owner can stop reading the whole sheet. A shorter file is no help if tomorrow's booking went missing. What fields would you require to match before letting a helper remove an order?