

The example in the screen shot below shows a summary of the steps. Note: There are 2 formulas shown below- one for Excel 365, and one for earlier versions of ExcelĪ) For Excel 365, or other versions that have the new Spill Functions, use this formula:ī) For earlier versions of Excel, use this formula - it will work in any version of Excel: It finds how many characters, starting from the left in each cell, are a match. The formula in column D is doing the hard work. The first step in calculating the percent that the cells match is to find the length of the address in column A. Column E: Compare results from first two formulas, to calculate the percent match.Column D: Based on that number of characters, how many characters in column B are a match, starting from the left?.Column C: Calculate length of text in column A.Here's what the 3 formulas do, and the formula details are shown in the sections below: With formulas in columns C, D and E, we can calculate a percentage match, by comparing the address in column B to the original address in column A. Here’s a sample list, where the addresses in column A and B and being compared. UniMord created this formula for a project at work, where he needed to compare old and new addresses. =EXACT(RIGHT(TRIM(A2),3),RIGHT(TRIM(B2),3))įinally, here’s a formula from UniMord, that checks how much of a match there is between two cells.This formula will ignore extra spaces, but checks the case: You can combine LEFT or RIGHT with TRIM, if you’re not concerned about the space characters:Īnd combine LEFT or RIGHT with EXACT, to check if upper/lower case match too. For example, check the last 3 characters: To compare characters at the end of the cells, use the RIGHT function. For example, check the first 3 characters: To compare characters at the beginning of the cells, use the LEFT function. The following examples use the LEFT and RIGHT functions to compare partial text in two different cells.
Compare two columns in excel for match full#
Sometimes you don’t need a full comparison of two cells – you just need to check the first few characters at the left, or a 3-digit code at the right end of a string.
Compare two columns in excel for match download#
You can download the sample file there too. For each example shown in the video, you'll find the written steps for each example on the EXACT Function Examples page. This video shows a few more EXACT function examples. This function doesn’t test the cell formatting though, so it won’t check if one cell has some or all of the characters in bold, and the other cell doesn’t.

If you need to compare two cells for contents and upper/lower case, use the EXACT function.Īs its name indicates, the EXACT function can check for an exact match between text strings, including upper and lower case. That can help if you’re trying to match text strings to the values in an imported list, such as this VLOOKUP example.

If you just want to compare two cells, but aren’t concerned about leading spaces, trailing spaces, or extra spaces, use the TRIM function to remove them, for one or both of the cells. Note: Upper and lower case versions of the same letter are treated as equal, as you can see in the screen shot below. If the contents of cell A2 and cell B2 are the same, the result is TRUE. The quickest way to compare two cells is with a formula that uses the equal sign. After that, we'll try different tests, for more complex comparisons of the contents of two cells on an Excel worksheet. In the sections below, we'll start with a simple check of the cell contents. How can you compare two cells in Excel, to see if they are exactly the same, or partially match? On this page, there are a few functions and formulas that check the contents of two cells, to see if they are the same. Download the Workbook Introduction: Compare Cell Values
