Looking for a formula to lookup similar names within two columns in Excel

Question

I have two lists of Company Names. List A is longer than List B. For example, "Bob's Inc." in List A may be "Bobs Incorporated" in List B, or even "Bo.b's Company" Both lists may have the longer or the shorter name. I can't make one formula per company, otherwise I would do something like VLOOKUP(" "&Bob&" "...)

I was thinking of doing the similar lookup twice, once for the longer list and once for the shorter list, where we would cover the problem of the differing names. However, I am getting the incorrect company name as an output. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I don't clearly understand your objective, if you want to search on List A and if your value isn't then you look up on List B: you may try with nested IFERROR

IFERROR(VLOOKUP("bob's Inc";List_A;col_index;false);IFERROR(VLOOKUP("Bobs Incorporated";List_B;col_index;false);"Not found")

If value isn't found it goes to "error" argument which is other VLOOKUP. You could search on more List/tables/ranges with more nested IFERROR.

I hope it meets your needs.