Using vlookup but with partially identical cells

[winds]

So I have two sets of data in one column.. say sheet 1 and sheet 2 and they are both in column J, followed by their sets of data in the following columns. As usual vlookup works to return the data in the column stated by the user if there is a match.. example data in sheet 1 looks up data in sheet 2 then return some user set column. The problem here is half of the data in column J has changed partially. Doing manual lookup would be too cumbersome as there is about 2000 partially changed data. The way I thought was to use a delimiter with space (as some of the text is separated by space.. which here lies the data that can still be partially matched) and perhaps vlookup in those separated data which could work... and then vlookup the remainder data and maybe at some point still have to manual but at least there's less data to look through.

Any1 have any other ideas to go about this problem?

 

[winds]

And to prevent vlookup of similar data, I thought a pivot table could help and show values where a value of 1 would mean the data is unique, however more than 1 would be the data that would need further checking.