text match

I'm a teacher and I have a vocabulary database of common English words--and the many derivatives of those words--that I want to teach my ESL students. I've manipulated the database to the point that it looks like this: <tbody> Singular Noun Plural Noun Base Verb Form First Person...

I have a VBA macro that looks for words that occur in strings. I do not want to match words that occur as part of other words, e.g. “bar” in barrier. I would like to match “ bar “ or “.Bar “ or “bar-“ “-bar”, i.e the word “bar”. Is there a function or application to do this? Piece of code...

Can I use excel to look up a list of names (text) and identify the matches? An additional issue complicates this, so question 2 is: can I have Excel identify a match say if a certain # of characters match, but not all match exactly? For example: I see: AJReynolds and A J Reynolds and A.J...