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.
