Rate Similarity of Two Columns

[kmprice710]

I have two columns of two data that are name-matched but they're not exactly the same.
Column A Column B
Dave Adams David Adams
John C. Hall Jack Hall
Pam Benedict Pamela Benedict

I'd like to have Excel look at the two cells for each row and say how similar they are, like 90%, 80%, etc. I don't need to know if they're exact matches. I know they're not; I do need to pick out ones that are the furthest from being matches.
Is there a way to do this?

 

[KRice]

You could utilize Power Query's fuzzy matching algorithm and then incorporate the SimilarityColumnName option to obtain the percentage match according to that algorithm. Starting with this table:

Book6
	A	B
1	Name1	Name2
2	Dave Adams	David Adams
3	John C. Hall	Jack Hall
4	Pam Benedict	Pamela Benedict
Sheet1

Power Query delivers this result:

Book6
	A	B	C
1	Name1	Name2	Similarity
2	Dave Adams	David Adams	0.41
3	John C. Hall	Jack Hall	0.37
4	Pam Benedict	Pamela Benedict	0.41
Merge1

The M code for producing this result:

let
    Source = Table.FuzzyNestedJoin(Table1, {"Name1"}, Table1, {"Name2"}, "Table1", JoinKind.LeftOuter, [IgnoreCase=true, IgnoreSpace=true, Threshold=0.3, SimilarityColumnName="Similarity"]),
    #"Expanded Table1" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(Source, "Table1", {"Similarity"}, {"Similarity"})
in
    #"Expanded Table1"