In this post, we would see how to get started with Fuzzy look-up add-in for excel.

First up, Which problem does Fuzzy Lookup add-in for excel solve? It cleans similar (a.k.a matching) textual data in Excel. E.g. “Mr Paras Doshi”, “Doshi Paras”, “Paras A Doshi” are similar and may refer to the same person – Fuzzy look-up helps you detect such similar textual data. This add-in is really handy if you are “combining” data from different systems where the data is not in the same format – using this add-in you can detect similar looking text and clean the data-set at hand. With that, Here are the steps to download, install and play with this add-in:

1) Download “Fuzzy Lookup add-in for Excel. Read: Over view, system requirements and Instructions

URL: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15011 

(If this doesn’t work – search for “Fuzzy lookup add in for excel”

2) Note the sample excel file called “Portfolio” that comes with the download files. We’ll open it after the Successful installation of the add-in:

3)Install it.

I left the default on all dialog boxes.

4) Open the sample file: “portfolio”

5) Click on Install if you see a dialog box “Microsoft Office customization folder”

(please read the message in the dialog box too)

6) Can you see Fuzzy Lookup in Excel Toolbar? Yes? Great!

7) Now if you have opened the Portfolio file then you’ll see a tutorial on how to get started on the worksheet named portfolio:

8) follow the above tutorial to get started. I just did!

Conclusion:

In this post, we saw how Fuzzy Lookup add-in for excel 2010 help you find matching text from two data sources. I hope that helps.

Related articles

• Crunch more than 1 million rows in Excel 2010 with free addin called Power Pivot! (parasdoshi.com)