Changing multiple variations of names into one name

[Boomexcel]

Hello all, I've heard this is a very helpful group of individuals and hopefully you can help me solve my issue. Also, sorry if this is answered somewhere, I have hard time searching this situation.

I currently run a report each day containing training data for multiple companies. The issue that I have is the website where the training is hosted, allows the employees to write out their company names when submitting their info. Because of this, I am left with multiple variations of the company's name in my file. The variations can be due to a mix of lowercase/uppercase, adding/not adding punctuation, misspellings, etc. This makes it difficult when I pull this data into a pivot table or try to organize it since I can have so many variations of the same company name.

What I would like to do is have something setup in the file that would allow me to either fix the variations so I ended up with one consistent name or have it so there is a separate column that feeds the variations into and spits out my singular name.

For example:
For the company Woodcutting International (how I would like it to appear), I may see Woodcutting international, woodcutting international, Woodcutting Int, Woodcutting Int., Wodcutting International.

 

[steve the fish]

Hi. Maybe try to make a lookup table so you can lookup the different names to produce a single name?

Woodcutting international	Woodcutting International
Woodcutting Int.	Woodcutting International
Woodcutting Int	Woodcutting International
Wodcutting International	Woodcutting International

<colgroup><col style="mso-width-source:userset;mso-width-alt:6363; width:131pt" width="174" span="2"> </colgroup><tbody>
</tbody>

Then you can create a new column with a vlookup and use that in your pivot table.

 

[HackSlash]

There are many ways to do this. The most versatile is to use REGEX in VBA. That is also the most advanced. You can easily use fuzzy matching or convert both source and destination using UPPER() to ignore case. There are so many ways to do this you really need to give it a try and show us what you are doing. Show us the data and show us how you are trying to use it.