Forum Discussion
Duplicate Values that are not exact match
Hello,
I have an excel file with names I need to clean up. I started with using conditional formatting to highlight all duplicate values and deleted the duplicates. There are still duplicates in the file that don't share the exact name. For example, there's one cell called "Blackline Safety", and another called "Blackline Safety Corp". These are duplicates, but I don't know how to do it without looking manually. Is there any way to get excel to find the duplicates like that?
Thanks
4 Replies
We had a similar problem, and also tried fuzzy search, but it did not work at all. However, today - 6 years later - it's trivially solvable by LLMs. Are you willing or able to export/import the data? If so, you could use a cheap LLM with free tier to match the tables easily.
We have been using the approach for many other cases, as there is still not yet a good universal solution, so we build our own and used this approach at (we do have a case study for this at futuresearch . ai /crm-deduplication).
- Thank you. I'll give that shot.
As variant you may try Fuzzy join in Power Query which could give something like
but that takes time to play with parameters.
Any Fuzzy tool won't give absolutely correct result, it's with some probability. We may improve result with options, but in any cased it shall be reviewed finally.
