finding similar records in excel

[kgkev]

First off this is only in the planning stages so I don't need any definitive answers yet. I'm sure this is quite a common task to perform so I'm just asking for advise at the moment.

I have about 150,000 stock records and I need to somehow remove duplicates.


This would be easy but they will not be exact duplicates. For instance

Circuit Breaker CZ-123456 should match
CB Main CZ-123456 and
Circuit Breaker 220V 12A 123456


Anyone come across this sort of thing before? Any advise welcome

 

[Yard]

So the duplicate is the 123456?

 

[VoG]

This may help http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?p=955137#974873

 

[kgkev]

So the duplicate is the 123456?

only in this case - I'm looking for similar records rather than duplicate records.

 

[kgkev]

This may help http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?p=955137#974873

I had a look at that and it does seem to be almost there. however I would want to compare all 150,000 records to another 150,000 records and somehow link the matches so they could be manually checked and marked for deletion.

I think the 22,500,000,000 calculations required to make every comparison would cause my PC to implode.

I'm thinking I'm going to have to break it down further manually before I start do an automatic comparison.