What "function" will work to compare two columns of information?

[Scott]

Good morning. I have two columns of information (customer names). I
need to compare the two columns. And when one name equals the name in
the other column I need to place an x or flag that name. Help!!!
Any direction would be much appreciated! Thanks, Scott

 

[Norman Harker]

Hi Scott!

See:

Chip Pearson:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm#TaggingDuplicates

See the rest of that page for most of what you need on handling unique
and duplicate data problems.

--
Regards
Norman Harker MVP (Excel)
Sydney, Australia
(e-mail address removed)
Excel and Word Function Lists (Classifications, Syntax and Arguments)
available free to good homes.

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
have a look at
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm#ExtractingCommon
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm#InOneNotOther

 

[jammy]

assuming you want to compare two different columns in the same row only
the formula

=if(A1=B1,1,0)

would give you what you want i.e put a 1 where the two match.

on the other hand if you want to check the value from column A to al
the values in column B and see if there is a match in there, you woul
want an array formula like

=OR(EXACT(A1, $B$1:$B$20))

where EXACT "Compares two text strings and returns TRUE if they ar
exactly the same, FALSE otherwise. EXACT is case-sensitive but ignore
formatting differences."

this checks A1 against all the values in the range B1:B20 and return
true or false according to whether it finds an exact match or not.

note that after typing the formula you need to press ctrl+shift+ente
to tell excel it is an array formula. (excel97)

hope this help