metrics - delete duplicates

Hello All,

I was wondering if you someone could help me solve my problem. Essentially I have 8 lists of parts all with a different "status". I have created a macro that opens each of these individually, and prints a summary of how many are of a certain status within a user specified date range. The problem is: 7 of these lists are completely independent and will not have a duplicate. The 8th list however, is a priority list - it can contains parts from all of the seven other lists. I need to essentially check this list against all of the other lists, and if there is a duplicate on one of the 7 lists, I want to subtract 1 from the count. I currently loop through the data on each list and have a counter per each status, so that is not the issue. The issue that i foresee is that in order to accomplish this i will either have to
a) copy the 8th list into each of the 7 other ones, display duplicates, and then delete both of the duplicates before i run the macro to count the number of each type
b) import each of the part numbers into an array, and then check the value of every part in lists 1-7 against every part in the array, and delete if its a duplicate

I think I can successfully implement either of these options but I believe that both of them will be ridiculously slow.

Anyone have any ideas on how I can do this?

thank you very much for your time

anyone have and ideas?