I have two very, very long lists of words, stored as single-column
Excel spreadsheets. I need to compare these two spreadsheets or
columns and find out which words they have in common, and which words
are unique to each list. (I tried to do this by copying them into Word
and using the Compare Documents function, but Word was flaky--it
mostly worked, but it missed a few words for some reason). This seems
like something that Excel would be able to do with a fairly basic
function, but I don't know the program well enough. Is it possible to
sort for matches?

Comments also welcome! Thank you!

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 11 Aug 2005 02:19 PDT

fieldlily...

The formulae on this page from Pearson Software Consulting
seem promising in accomplishing what you want to do. Please
give them a look (and a try) and let me know if you have any
questions, or if they satisfy your interests:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm

sublime1-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by hummer-ga on 11 Aug 2005 11:47 PDT

Hi fieldlily,

Perhaps one of these would work for you?

The Duplicate Master V1.3 (freeware)
http://members.iinet.net.au/~brettdj/

Duplicate Finder (free to try)
http://www.sharewaresoft.com/Duplicate-Finder-for-Microsoft-Excel-download-8957.htm

Regards,
hummer

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Clarification of Question by fieldlily-ga on 15 Aug 2005 12:46 PDT

To respond to your questions, hummer-ga and sublime1-ga, the Pearson
Consulting program did not work, but the Duplicate Master did.
Hummer-ga, the $10 is yours.

I am sorry it took me some time to follow up with this. . . all of
these solutions required a certain amount of figuring out and
troubleshooting before I could be sure exactly what they accomplished
and how. Thank you again.

~fieldlily-ga

Dear Audrey,

Thank you for letting me know the good news and for giving me the
opportunity to post an answer, I appreciate it. I'm really glad to
hear that Duplicate Master did the trick for you and that all is well.

The Duplicate Master V1.3 (freeware)
http://members.iinet.net.au/~brettdj/

Sincerely,
hummer

Just the info I needed.

VLOOKUP("the value your looking for the first file","the column with
all the value in the second file",1,0)

let's say you you have your first list in the column A and your second
list in the column A of the file Book2.xls you put the following in
the cells B1 of the first file
=VLOOKUP(A1,[Book2]Sheet1!$A:$A,1,0)
and copy it down to the end of the first column.

If it doest find it you will get #N/A
 good luck

Hi everybody,

Thanks so much to the three of you! It turns out that the Pearson
Consulting solution will only find duplicates *if* they are in the
same row in a spreadsheet; otherwise it ignores them. But the
Duplicate Master works very well on PCs. I tried it first on my Mac
and it fritzed out, but I have an IBM at work, so it solved my
problem.

Thanks again!

Audrey

Audrey...

Thanks very much for the feedback clarifying the limitations
of the Pearson Consulting solution. That will be useful to
future readers.

sublime1-ga

For the record, brettdj is also very glad that it worked for you! I
directed him to this post a while back and he's been watching.

Cool!