Question

Once again I’ve got a problem with mixed format data in excel file. I’ve got the file with column named “User Name”. The biggest problem for me to solve is that data in this column consists of last name and first name of person in totally mixed format. For example:

“User Name”
John Smith
Carter Mike
Garfield, Tom

And so on…

I’ve got the second file which contains data in the proper format, I’ve got there 3 columns: “Last Name”, “First Name” and “Id”. What I need to do is to copy the Id that match the person from the second file to the first file.

My idea was to loop through “User Name” column and compare it using InStr function with at first “Last Name” column and if it matches to compare with “First Name” column. Then if there is a match I would copy Id to the column “B” in the first file. But it turned out that I’m too weak in VBA.

Here is what I’ve written. It doesn’t work at all, but maybe will help you to understand what my problem is:

Option Explicit

Sub FindID()

Dim rLastCell, rFirstCell, rUserCell As Range
Dim LastCell, FirstCell, UserCell As Range
Dim file As Workbook
Dim i As Long

'open file to compare
Set file = Workbooks.Open(Filename:=ThisWorkbook.Path & "\gooddata.xls")

'set last used cell
Set rLastCell = file.Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("A65536").End(xlUp)
Set rFirstCell = file.Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("B65536").End(xlUp)
Set rUserCell = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Range("C65536").End(xlUp)

With ThisWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")

For Each UserCell In .Range("C2:C" & rUserCell.Row)
    For Each LastCell In file.Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A2:A" & rLastCell.Row)
        If InStr(0, UserCell.Value, LastCell.Value, vbTextCompare) <> 0 Then
            For Each FirstCell In file.Sheets("Sheet1").Range("B2:B" & rFirstCell.Row)
                If InStr(0, UserCell.Value, FirstCell.Value, vbTextCompare) <> 0 Then
                    'copy id from gooddata.xls to baddata.xls
                End If
            Next FirstCell
        End If
    Next LastCell
Next UserCell

End With

file.Close savechanges:=True
Set file = Nothing

End Sub

Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

Given that:

• It needs to run a limited amount of times
• The source data is badly formatted which demands some proofreading of the result
• There will likely be some cases that need to manually ‘corrected’

My advice is to use excel itself more than VBA. Specifically the VLOOKUP() function.
If you do there are 2 ways to go with this

The first:

• In the gooddata and a few new columns that concatenate lastname/firstname in the different formats that you expect “Firstname Lastname”, “Lastname, Firstname” etc
• Then in the baddata sheet at columns with a VLOOKUP() to do a lookup for the different formats where the lookup value is the id
• Now you get multiple columns with ids for matched formats and blanks for missed lookups that you can evaluate and correct where needed

The second is to do it the other way around:

• Add a firstname and a lastname column in your baddata excelsheet that you populate from the name column (requires lot of left/instr stuff)
• Create one combined (consistently formatted) name column that you can do a vlookup for in gooddata

If you make sure to create proper formula’s you could simply paste in new ‘bad data’ in the username column for subsequent datasets