Highlight duplicate rows based off 9 first characters of my 12 character long number

Hello,


I dont know VBA but i am going to learn) I just came across a Problem today and I know there is a quicker way for doing what I will explain below..

basically i have a sheet full of data,,and in the first column i have numbers that look like this VS3-0044-002/VS3-0044-004 and I would like to tell excel to highlight all rows that are duplicates...but only to count the first 9 characters in my row
VS3-0044-
VS3-0044- so these would be highlighted as a duplicates....


does anyone know how to do that???

thank you all in advance!

Hi,

thank you SHG for you answer but i am using left formula until now..but then if i have a 4000 rows i have to scroll down..to highlight all rows manually ....the thing is i dont want to delete anything of my sheet...just highlights the "pairs" together that only differ by last 3 digit...i hope i explained this right...