Searching and replacing "- "

[izhassan]

I have a worksheet that contains 900 rows of text data. In the column some of the text starts with a hyphen and space "- ". The others start with a number or alphabets. I am trying to compare this column to another one and find matches between them using IF(ISERROR(MATCH. I followed the thread

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/923389-=if-iserror-match-question.html

and it helped. But I'm seeing that half of the data that should match is not because of this "- ". Is there somehow I can remove this? Also note that space hyphen space also appears in rows somewhere in the middle of the text. I don't want that to be replaced.

 

[izhassan]

I guess I don't understand the context. Can you post the whole IF(ISERROR(MATCH formula you are having difficulty with?

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A3,$C$3:$C$117,0)),"","MATCH")

This is what I'm using to match each entry in row A to the entire Column C, find the match and return "MATCH" in column B. Column C has 114 entries and column A has 897. So essentially column B should return 114 matches, but what I'm getting is 63 Matches. The data is still present though, I've checked manually.

and thank you Radian89, Your formula works as well.

 

[FlameRetired]

Have you checked data in column C for trailing / leading spaces? Also check for other non-printable characters such as CHAR(10) and CHAR(160). They are difficult to detect without formula.