Hi,
I have a list of five hundred companies on a spreadsheet called "Companies" and another spreadsheet called "Public" with all 7,000+ public companies and their associated ticker symbols. I'm trying to match on the company names of both lists (column A of both spreadsheets) and return the associated ticker symbol. However, the names don't match precisely. Some names have ", Inc." (with a comma and space) or ", Corp." at the end, while some don't have any suffix or have “Inc.” without a comma. To make matters more complicated, some have the word "Corporation" spelled out completely instead of the ", Corp." abbreviation. For example, on one list Microsoft is simply "Microsoft", while on the other list it's called "Microsoft Corporation".
Using “true” or 1 in the fourth parameter of VLOOKUP doesn’t help. The matches I get are close, but no cigar. Excel spits out a match but not the right one.
Any ideas on how to solve this without resorting to brute force, manual lookups?
Thanks
I have a list of five hundred companies on a spreadsheet called "Companies" and another spreadsheet called "Public" with all 7,000+ public companies and their associated ticker symbols. I'm trying to match on the company names of both lists (column A of both spreadsheets) and return the associated ticker symbol. However, the names don't match precisely. Some names have ", Inc." (with a comma and space) or ", Corp." at the end, while some don't have any suffix or have “Inc.” without a comma. To make matters more complicated, some have the word "Corporation" spelled out completely instead of the ", Corp." abbreviation. For example, on one list Microsoft is simply "Microsoft", while on the other list it's called "Microsoft Corporation".
Using “true” or 1 in the fourth parameter of VLOOKUP doesn’t help. The matches I get are close, but no cigar. Excel spits out a match but not the right one.
Any ideas on how to solve this without resorting to brute force, manual lookups?
Thanks