I have a large list where I'm trying to put everything into family categories.
As an example, if I have the following list, a person could go through and identify that there are families of parts: ABC, ABCD, CDE, CDF, and ZZ. Sometimes the families are identified by the first 3 characters and sometimes its by the first 2 or 4 characters.
In my real table, the family names could be identified by the first 1-6 characters. Is there a way to automate Excel to help identify and group these families? this could get very memory intensive, so I'm looking for suggestions on how to approach this. I've thought about extracting the first 6 characters, then counting how many other records also have those first 6 characters. If no other ones exist, then step down by one character and repeat the process. I realize this could be very intensive, but I'm not sure what else to do.
As an example, if I have the following list, a person could go through and identify that there are families of parts: ABC, ABCD, CDE, CDF, and ZZ. Sometimes the families are identified by the first 3 characters and sometimes its by the first 2 or 4 characters.
ABC12 |
ABC14 |
ABCD15 |
ABCD20 |
CDE12 |
CDE25 |
CDF20 |
ZZ33 |
ZZ60 |
In my real table, the family names could be identified by the first 1-6 characters. Is there a way to automate Excel to help identify and group these families? this could get very memory intensive, so I'm looking for suggestions on how to approach this. I've thought about extracting the first 6 characters, then counting how many other records also have those first 6 characters. If no other ones exist, then step down by one character and repeat the process. I realize this could be very intensive, but I'm not sure what else to do.