Excel compare two columns

Question

I have two columns in excel

A and B

I want to compare both and highlight where there is a match, however it is not a direct comparison

Column A has data like this

ABC123

whereas Column B only has

123

So I want to find 123 in Column A from Column B and highlight the match.

I need to do this for 9000 records

Pleas help

Answer 1

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(B1,A1)),"Match","")

This in column C will work for you.

What this does is use Search(find text,in text,[position]) to see whether the exact string appears in column A. If it does it will return a number (the position that this string starts in) so =IF(ISNUMBER( can use that data accordingly.

Answer 2

You can do this without additiona formula's and VBA as well. Make a conditional format on cell B1 that is a formula:

=NOT(ISERROR(SEARCH(B1,A1)))

Note: Make sure that the values are B1 and A1, NOT $B$1 and $A$1.

Under Applies to fill in "B:B". Add a nice format for matched values.

Answer 3

An option is to strip out the letters from column A and try a direct match

You can use a UDF for this

Public Function StripChar(strInput As String) As String
    Dim i As Long: For i = 1 To Len(strInput)
        If IsNumeric(Mid(strInput, i, 1)) Then StripChar = StripChar + CStr(Mid(strInput, i, 1))
    Next i
End Function

Then you can either use a helper function or direct conditional formatting with the following formula:

=IF(StripChar(A2)=TEXT(B2,"0"),TRUE,FALSE)