Excel Pattern search

[Ify]

I need an excel formular to search for similar items from one sheet t
another and identify the customer no if similar pattern found.

Exemple:

Sheet 1:

Customer Name:

Freb baker
Harry Joseph
Craig Juta
Alfred keith

Sheet2:

Name No

Crag Jut
Fred Baka
Kaith Alf
Josep Har

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
IMHO no feasible with Excel. You're looking for some 'fuzzy' logic or
'pattern' search. There're some dedicated application in the market
(quite expensive if I remeber correctly) who could do such pattern
matches on customer data.

 

[Daniel.M]

Hello,

You're looking for 'fuzzy match' or approximate string matching (ASM).

Various algos exists to do that, i.e. computing 'edit distance' between 2
strings. Look on the web for Levenshtein distance (this guy had a very good
reason to invent such a beast)
They usually return a percentage (0% to 100%) of similarity between two strings.

Take a look here and the threads associated with these articles:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...=1&[email protected]

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g...=1&[email protected]

The mp() function can be found directly here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=eRlSt2HKBHA.1592@tkmsftngp04

There is also an implementation of a Fuzzy Match algo at MrExcel:
http://www.mrexcel.com/pc07.shtml
but you'll have to translate it to a function (and then use a wrapper, like I
did for Harlan Grove's mp() VBA function ).

Reply if you're not satisfied with the similarity algos indicated here, as there
are others that might comply more directly with your requirements (but more
additional specs would be required).

Regards,

Daniel M.