Using fuzzy logic in excel

[James]

Hello everyone,

does anyone know of an application or vb code that can be
used to search in two worksheets (like VLOOKUP) on
similar matches using fuzzy logic? For example, if on
one sheet I have I.B.M and the other IBM or James Smith
on one and Jim Smith on the other, is there anyway of
giving confidence codes to the match?

Thanks very much for your help,

James

 

[Dave O]

AFAIK this does require VBA code. I wrote an Access utility in VBA
that does exactly this chore: it works by scrubbing punctuation out of
each list, then comparing each "word" ("Ed" and "Begley" and "Jr" are
each words in this context) in each entry in list A to each word in
each entry in list B. The output is an integer number corresponding to
the number of word matches found.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello James-

Based on the nature of your data, it could be possible that VLOOKUP uses
logic "fuzzy" enough as it is. If the lookup values include many similar
entries, though, that may not be the case.

Forgive me if you are already aware of this, but although the fx does look
for an exact match, but it uses the preceding row once it finds an item that
is "higher" than what it is looking for. The key is that the lookup table
must be sorted in ascending order based on the first column.

FWIW |:>)

 

[James]

Thanks for your help.

James

-----Original Message-----
Hello James-

Based on the nature of your data, it could be possible that VLOOKUP uses
logic "fuzzy" enough as it is. If the lookup values include many similar
entries, though, that may not be the case.

Forgive me if you are already aware of this, but although the fx does look
for an exact match, but it uses the preceding row once it finds an item that
is "higher" than what it is looking for. The key is that the lookup table
must be sorted in ascending order based on the first column.

FWIW |:>)

.

 

[Guest]

Hi Dave,

I don't seem to be a

 

[James]

Hi Dave,

I don't seem to be able to read your whole reply. Are
you able to share the access utility that you created?

Thanks,

James

 

[Dave O]

James:
Let's take this offline: contact me at (e-mail address removed). I'm a bit
proprietary about applications I've written- but in the spirit of good
Netizenship I'll run the application against your data. If you'd like
me to do this, send lists A and B as text files to me at
(e-mail address removed). I'll send the results list back to you as text (or
as zipped text, since the file can be large).

Let me know-
Dave O

 

[Dave O]

Google fudged my email address: it is
cyclezen at yahoo dot com