Comparing two lists for matches - with a twist!

[Vidita]

Hi,
I am trying to do the following:

There are two sets of supplier lists - A List and B List. I need to
compare the two lists. Source A is my master. Source B is a subset of
that but has contact information for all the suppliers. Hence, my goal
is to retrieve the contact information from Source B and match it to
the suppliers of Source A.

The above can be easliy achieved using a vlookup funtion. But the
problem is that some of the supplier names in the two lists are not
exact matches. Hence, vlookup does not catch it. For instance, a
supplier is listed as ABC Inc. in A list and as ABC, inc. in the
other.

Please advise what is a good way to find the matches, when they are
not exact. Putting "TRUE" as the last parameter in the vlookup
function doesn't work as it is too broad.

Thanks,
Vidita.

 

[squenson]

I do not know any standard Excel function that could do that. May be you
could create a new column into the supplier master that contains the first n
characters of the supplier (=LEFT(A2, n)), and do a VLOOKUP using this column.