Background: I'm trying to make a program for combining two tables based off of unique/similar names. Because these tables come from two different sources, the names may or may not be an exact match (e.g. "Dave Beck" and "David Beck"). The goal is to have a system that creates a new table (Unique Names) and then does the following things:
- For each name that has zero approximate matches, add it to Unique Names
- For each name that DOES have an approximate match, add both names to a temporary table
- Create a popup window that will, for each entry in the temporary table, ask the user if the two names are, in fact, matches or not
- If the names are matches, merge the two entries and add the resulting entry to Unique Names
- If the names are not matches, add both of them to Unique Names
Problem: However, I can't even make it past step 1 and I've been at this for hours. I've looked up everything I could thing of. Lookup functions can't return approximate matches, and neither can the Index/Match combo. The fuzzy lookup add-in doesn't actually return any values without an unreasonable amount of work for this task and so can't be used for checking each name individually.
There has to be some way to just simply check if a certain name has any approximate (not partial) matches or not. There's an over-the-top add-in that does it, so there's got to be some method of accomplishing this task. Any help or guidance would be much appreciated as I am at my wits end as to how to do this. Thanks in advance!
