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Excel: Matching Text Against a List of Words

Here's the sitch:

We had a long, long list of keywords related to music. We had another long list of artists, and we needed to identify all the keywords that contained one of the artists. Manually, something like 10 hours of work.

Excel-magically? Half an hour of research.

The keywords go in column A. The list of artists goes in column X. The following function is copied down column B:

=IF(OR(ISNUMBER(FIND(X$1:X$500, A1))),"TRUE","FALSE")

This will throw a "VALUE" error immediately unless you enter it the Right Way, which means to hit SHIFT + CTRL + ENTER when you're done. That puts it in curly brackets and makes it an "array function."

The FIND function allows for keywords to be scrambled and include extra words.

This 'business process' is under a provisional patent by Tom Dalton. You can use it if you pay me $10,000 per keyword.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on July 11, 2006 11:26 AM.

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