Finding out whether a surname is contained in another row field

roomaleuk

New Member
Joined
Nov 7, 2015
Messages
6
Hi
I am look for a way to find out whether a surname is being used as part of a user name

The file that I am looking at has around 10,000 records and is set up with the following columns
A - Title (Mr, Mrs etc.)
B - Forename (John, Jane, Jenny etc.)
C - Surname (Smith, Brown, James etc.)
D to M - Various pieces of information about the record - address telephone etc

In column N I have a field that contains User Names and the only constraint that has been placed on these is that they must be greater than 5 characters and less than 20 characters. For some reason the user name may include spaces

So in effect - I am look at establish whether the value in column C (Surname) is part of the user name (column N) on a row by row basis

So the surname Smith may be found in the user names
J Smith
J & A Smith
James Smith
John Smith esq

In all of these cases I would like to indicate that the row has a probable match

Whereas in the case of
JSmith
Smithy
A Smithers

These would be marked as 'review' or possible

I have tried various combinations of find, substitute and the like to get around the spaces - but to no avail.

A friend of mine suggested that I look on this forum - and if I couldn't find anything to post a new thread l - so .. here's the posting

I hope that this makes some sense .. and any assistance would be gratefully received as this has become a bit of a quest

Thanks in advance for any help or pointers

Andy
 

Excel Facts

Which Excel functions can ignore hidden rows?
The SUBTOTAL and AGGREGATE functions ignore hidden rows. AGGREGATE can also exclude error cells and more.
Excellent thanks - this is pretty much what I wanted - it's also highlighted some other quirks in the data that I have inherited ...

I think I'll be hanging around here a lot moving forward

All the best

Andy
 
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