Find data in a huge pile

[bigdan]

I'm playing around with different systems which haven't been mapped properly. Essentially I'm trying to see if data in one system exists in the other, and if so what the fields would be called.

Once I get all the data into Excel, is there a way to see if data in group A exists anywhere in group B? Essentially this would be like a vlookup, except instead of looking at one column I want it to look at all the data in 30 columns. Can that be done?

 

[Rick Rothstein]

Re: how to find data in a huge pile

Let's say the first 5 letters being the same? I may tweak that later but that's a good start.

Okay, assuming the text whose first 5 letters you want to match is in cell B1 and you want to examine the range A1:A100...

=COUNTIF(A1:A100,LEFT(B1,5)&"*")