To find duplicates: While holding down the left mouse button, drag the mouse to select all of the cells to be tested for duplicates. To exclude sections of the lists, stop dragging, press the Ctrl key and start dragging again at the desired place. To find duplicates among regular text, turn on Ignore Ranges. To find duplicates among indexed items (e.g. reference designators), turn on Count Ranges. Then click Get/Test. Any duplicates found within your selection will be shown.

To display differences: To do a quick overall compare to determine if the same items exists in two lists, select the first list and click Get/Test. Select the second list and click Subtract. Any items displayed are items not found in the second list. While the second list is selected, click Get/Test and then Subtract the first list.  Any items displayed are items not found in the first list.

Numbers are converted: Any text_numbers can be converted to number_values by selecting the Number-Values action and click Apply.

Numbers without alpha prefixes: to use Refinate's operations on comma delimited numbers, it might be necessary to format the column that the numbers will be pasted into as TEXT so that Excel does not treat the result as though it is only one very long number. Do this by clicking on the column index at the top of the sheet, right-click and FormatCells_Number_Text.

To list all of the do-not-include parts: Highlight a list of all the parts that could possibly be assembled that is produced by your development software and press Get/Test to join them. Paste that result into a cell. Highlight all the parts for the version of interest  to be assembled which are listed in the assembly BOM and press Get/Test to join them. Paste that result into a cell. Select  the first list pasted and click Get/Test and select the second list pasted and click Subtract. The result is a list of the do-not-include parts for that assembly version.

To create different assembly versions:  Type a list of all of the do-not-include reference designators for the assembly of interest into a cell and then click Get/Test to place that list into the Refinate Format display.  Insert a blank column to the right of the references designator column of the master BOM.  Put the cursor at the top cell of the list of reference designators of the master BOM.  Choose the action "Subtract Dsply V" from the action list and click Apply.  Only cells that have a match to the comma delimited text in the display will be altered (parts are omitted) when pasted to the right of the original cell.  All other newly pasted cells will be the same as the original cell to its left.

To compare BOM: Since Refinate can rearrange reference designators into a repeatable standard format, you can compare two different sources of assembly information that are supposed to represent the same build. First convert the lists using the One-row-per-part action if applicable. Then, one click of AutoPaste_Format writes the standard reference designator format into the column next to the pre-existing format. Do this for both lists and then sort those lists based on the new columns. You can then easily determine if both lists contain exactly the same reference designators on each line by either visually checking or, preferably, by writing an equation such as =if(A1=B1,"same","DIFF") and then pasting it appropriately so that each item listed will be verified automatically. A similar equation =if(A1<>B1,1,"") will return a blank for good comparisons and the number 1 for errors so they can be counted with a SUM equation. To make it easier to see the 1's, use Excel's Conditional Formatting to change the background color if the cell equals 1.

More about duplicates.

Other Tips are provided in Refinate's  help screens.