Spelling mistakes are a thing of day to day carporate life. Most of the data in spreadsheets is entered by people and hence prone to having spelling mistakes or alternate spellings. For eg. a person named John could have been spelled as Jon. And when John calls you back to confirm his reservation and you use the search / vlookup to find his information the result would empty.
Here is one technique that I use often when the data has spelling mistakes or I need to do fuzzy search to fetch items that sound or spelled similar. Take the 2 texts you want to compare and,
- Remove all the vowels – AEIOU
- Replace PH with F, Z & J with G, CK with K, W with V, LL with L, SS with S
- Remove any Hs
- Finally compare both texts
To simplify the above 4 steps I have written a small VBA UDF (User Defined Function) that takes a text parameter and performs the above 4 steps.
Function SimpleText(thisTxt As String) As String
' this function generates a simple text from input text that
' can be used for fuzzy search
thisTxt = LCase(thisTxt)
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "a", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "e", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "i", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "o", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "u", "")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ph", "f")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "z", "g")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ck", "k")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "w", "v")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "j", "g")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ll", "l")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "ss", "s")
thisTxt = Replace(thisTxt, "h", "")
SimpleText = thisTxt
End Function
The above code can be used to perform fuzzy text searches or searches on unclean data. Of course, the above substitution rules are what I find good enough. Feel free to define additional rules as per your needs so that your fuzzy searches work even better.
If you are looking for generating SOUNDEX codes for excel strings you can use this excel soundex UDF. Soundex codes are phonetic codes generated for words based on how they sound, thus 2 words sounding similar (for eg. excess, access) would have same soundex code. You can use these codes to perform fuzzy searches.
More on text processing using excel:
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!