Excel 2024: Use Fuzzy Match in Power Query

November 18, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

There's a research and development team at Microsoft known as Microsoft Labs. Almost 10 years ago, it invented a free Fuzzy Match add-in for Excel. A fuzzy matching algorithm looks for words that share a percentage of characters in common.

The figure below shows two data sets that need to be matched. Columns A and B contain the list of employees. Columns D and E contain the names of the employees who filled out a required form. You need to identify the people who haven't yet returned the form. Unfortunately, a VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP won't work since column A uses a 'last name, first name' format while column D contains a nickname and last name. These two data sets can be matched using the Fuzzy Match tool that's now built into Windows versions of Microsoft 365.

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Excel 2024: Clean Data with Power Query »

November 14, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

Power Query is built in to Windows versions of Office 365, Excel 2016, Excel 2019 and is available as a free download in Windows versions of Excel 2010 and Excel 2013. The tool is designed to extract, transform, and load data into Excel from a variety of sources.

Excel 2024: Improve Your Macro Recording »

November 11, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

I loved the 1985 version of the Macro Recorder in Lotus 1-2-3. The code was hard to understand, but it worked. There are some defaults in the Excel Macro Recorder that cause misery for anyone trying to record macros. Here are three tips to make the macro experience possibly better.

Excel 2024: Interpolate between a starting and ending number »

November 7, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

How to interpolate between a starting and ending number.

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Despite the moniker "data monkey," we information workers are often more like data magicians. Our data seldom enters our world in a ready-to-consume format; it can take hours of cleaning, filtering, and reshaping to get things ready to go. Power Query will make this process faster the first time and reduce it to a single button click every subsequent time.

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This is a 5th edition of MrExcel XL. Updates for 2021 include: LAMBDA, LET, Power Query Fuzzy Match, Sort & Filter in Sheet View, Cut-out people, Save object as image, STOCKHISTORY, Wolfram Alpha Data Types, Custom Data Types from Power Query, Weather data types, bilingual spreadsheets, Performance improvements, Unhide multiple worksheets, Action pen, Collapsible task panes, LET function to re-use calculations, store formulas using LAMBDA, Recursive LAMBDA, Branching LAMBDA, Lambda to return a picture, Excel function quick reference.

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Excel Worksheet, Power Query, Power Pivot, Power BI. Calculations, Analytics, Modeling, Data Analysis and Dashboard Reporting for the New Era of Dynamic Data Driven Decision Making & Insight!

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The 6th Edition of MrExcel XL, updated with new functions released for Microsoft 365.

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Excel 2024: Use Fuzzy Match in Power Query

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