'Near search' function in excel?

[imt123]

PLease help me out with this problem! It seems simple yet I can't do anything about it.

I have 3 lists of company names that I have acquired from three different sources. The companies mentioned are the same in each of the lists (the lists may have few additional names as well), but since I used 3 different sources for my data, they are worded slighty differently. For example, 'Aberdeen UK smaller Cos' might appear in another list as 'Aberdeen UK Smllr Companies', etc. Now I could manually match all companies across the 3 lists, but the lists are sufficiently long and I do not have enough time. Is it possible to do some sort of 'near matching' function in excel (preferably), or some other software?

I can provide a sample excel sheet with the 3 lists if needed. The reason why I need to match these lists is because I want to mearge the different data (from each of the sources) for each company in Stata for running regressions.

Any kind of help will be highly appreciated!

 

[VoG]

Try a Fuzzy Lookup http://www.mrexcel.com/board2/viewtopic.php?p=974873#974873

 

[Richard Schollar]

How competent with VBA are you? If you search this board for Fuzzy Vlookup you will get back a UDF written by board member al_b_cnu which can basically do what you want. Alternatively, Google "Soundex algorithm in VBA" which will probably also give you some pointers.

 

[imt123]

I was checking out the link provided, and I dont understand much of it! I haven't done much programming in excel, only statistical softwares like Stata,etc. Is there an easier way out of this?