Checking text in column A for partial match of text in column B

[ryanslundquist]

I have a list of companies that my company has in our customer relationship management software. This is column A. I have another list of companies that I have pulled off an online market place. This is column B.

I want to check if column A contains any of the companies that are in column B, even if it is only a partial match. For example, if the company name in column A is The North Face, but the company name in column B is North Face, then that should be considered a "current account." If the company in column B is NOT found in column A, then that should be considered a "net new company." Any ideas how to get this done? Thanks!

 

[General Ledger]

Check out Download Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel from Official Microsoft Download Center

The Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel was developed by Microsoft Research and performs fuzzy matching of textual data in Microsoft Excel. It can be used to identify fuzzy duplicate rows within a single table or to fuzzy join similar rows between two different tables. The matching is robust to a wide variety of errors including spelling mistakes, abbreviations, synonyms and added/missing data. For instance, it might detect that the rows “Mr. Andrew Hill”, “Hill, Andrew R.” and “Andy Hill” all refer to the same underlying entity, returning a similarity score along with each match. While the default configuration works well for a wide variety of textual data, such as product names or customer addresses, the matching may also be customized for specific domains or languages.

Best of luck,

G/L