Comparing text strings in Excel

Hey y'all! Would anyone please assist with this issue I've run into? Is it possible to compare text strings in two different cells within Excel? Pretty much I want Excel to compare text strings in two separate columns and check if the values match up - think strings like "Timmy, Bob, John" and in the other it may have the same names, but in a different order like "Bob, John, Timmy."

Another idea I had was potentially creating some code or maybe there's an Excel function counting the letters in a text string and if they match then output "Yes." Open to any suggestions. TIA!

4 Comments
 

I don’t know if this can be done in Excel, but you could do it easily using Python. If you look up videos about the library “pandas” you should be able to see pretty quickly how to do something like this. First you’d need to create functions that do what you’re describing to regular strings/lists in Python, and then you could make a program using pandas to apply/use them on an Excel file. If my answer is helpful in any way, you may want to consider posting this somewhere like stack overflow instead or you could probably find similar posts that have already been answered.

 

Brute force top-of-mind solution but could be recorded as macro.

1. Transpose copy & paste

2. Text to columns

3. Remove spaces

3. Transpose copy & paste back

4. Sort all columns individually A-Z

5. +CONCAT each column

6. Compare these values

 

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