highlighting cells with a similar name and grouping them

[slice_of_pineapple]

Hi.

I have a range of cells and im looking to highlight cells with a similar name and group them afterwards. See the example below.

P1234-s	50	600	330	540
P1234-m	12	23	56	89
P1234-l	1132	435	75656	747
P1234-xl	34534	567456	56756	34
P1234-xxl	45	56	23	2

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I have hundreds of cells like this with the number on the left and a size beside it. Is there a way to highlight the cells with the same letter or numbers and then grouping them from that? I have over 670 different numbers all broken down into 5 (or more or less) sizes per number. If i was to group them all manually id be here for days!!

Normally i would subtotal the first column but excel cant deal with there being a different size at the end of each code.

Is there an easy way to do this?

 

[svendiamond]

There are probably a few ways of accomplishing this, but the easiest one I could think of would be to add two columns: one that gets the sizes and one that gets the item number.

'to return the item number
=LEFT(A1,FIND("-",A1)-1)

'to return the size
=MID(A1,FIND("-",A1)+1,LEN(A1)-FIND("-",A1)+1)