Merging two Excel spreadsheets

[nectarinesupreme]

Hi all, I am very novice with Excel and I have a problem that I don't
even know where to start with. I have two different Excel
spreadsheets
that have data for different television programs. I need to go
through
and compile all of the data into one sheet. The main issue is that
there are different variations in both of the spreadsheets in how the
television programs are named. I am looking to find a way to go
through one column of television names and find the match in the
other
spreadsheet. Is there any function or method that I can use to do
this? Thanks for the help!

 

[Dave Peterson]

Chip Pearson has lots of techniques to work with duplicates:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm

 

[nectarinesupreme]

The problem is I'm not dealing with exact duplicates - the names of
the tv programs are not exactly the same. What I'm trying to figure
out is if there is a way to match up the "not exact" duplicates
somehow. If I'm able to match up the names of the shows from both
spreadsheets then it'll much easier for me to combine the two lines of
data for each show into one line.

 

[Dave Peterson]

I'd use the techniques at Chip's site to find exact matches.

After that, I think the rest is just a manual effort. I've never seen a good
way to find "almost duplicates"--especially with free format text entries.

 

[ajetrumpet]

I assume most of these program names from both spreadsheets are at least somewhat similar? Import your data from one file into the other at a certain insertion point, so your two data sets don't overlap. Then run a SELECT command using the * operator as the string wildcard at either the beginning or the end of the program names (strings) - whatever end is most similar. Will that work in this situation?