Can Excel access substrings and individual characters?

[bxc2739]

Can excel macro access SUBstring individual 'char' level? If so how?
If possible I'd like to compare only the first character of each of th
customer name fields.
Sometimes the customers go by acrynoms and sometimes the name is full
spelled out. So
to avoid a false negative it is more safe to search/filter by the firs
character of the beginning of the
word/name only. Does excel macro allow substring functionality? If I a
to comparing the first char of the name
field of each sheet how to I access this, what is the syntax fo
accessing & comparing substring characters??



I have two sheets 1 & 2. I’m to match customers from sheet 2 to 1.

I want to match by zip code and by name. If zip AND name of row(x) i
sheet 2
Matches with zip AND name of ANY of the 5000+ row(s) in sheet 1 the
highlight row(x) in sheet2. (to indicate a match)
If no match are found, then do nothing, and move on to next row o
sheet2 until all rows of sheet2 are finished comparing to the sheet1.

Basically I need to compare TWO fields simultaneiously, (double match
per row to the respective TWO fields with the second sheet I a
comparing too. If both criteria are meet then it is a match. Otherwis
it is left alone/ignored. I want to do this for all 35000+ rows in m
sheet2 which will take a long time without the help of a macro. Bot
the sheet to be worked on (sheet 2) and the sheet that exists only fo
comparison (sheet1) are huge and have many entries.

What I need to do now is the second step: How do I compare AT THE SAM
TIME both the ZIP CODE (numeric) AND the CUSTOMER NAM
(string/character/word) of sheet2 to the Zip and Name of sheet1.?

 

[Guest]

Examine the help topics on the following formulas, for substring manipulation:

LEFT(String, NumOfChars)
RIGHT(String,NumOfChars)
MID(String,StartPosition, NumOfChars)