Pulling specific text from cells

Good morning,

I deal with a monthly report that tracks vehicles that are sold each month. The data is pulled directly through our application/collection system. The report will spit out the vehicle's make in column A and the vehicle's model in column B. The issue I'm having is since it's pulled directly from our application, it pulls the exact vehicle name, when in reality I need it simplified. Take the following examples:

A1: Chevrolet Truck | B1: Tahoe-V6 XL
What I need/want A1: Chevrolet | B1: Tahoe

Another example:

A2: Dodge Truck | B2: RAM 1500 EXL-5 Series
What I need/want A2: Dodge | B2: Ram 1500

As it stands, I'm currently just going throw the columns manually and deleting all the extra text, but it would be great if I could simplify this.

Thank you,

Please give more sample data; I know how to do this.

I apologize if this isn't the most correct/efficient way to show more data, but I've extracted a portion to see:

http://i.imgur.com/PBHQAFf.png

You'll see that there is a lot of additive text specifically in the column for model. So I'd be looking to get rid of all extra text bout 4/6 cylinders or V6 and V8 text, XL's, SLE's, etc. (basically anything that does not simply say "F150" or "Cobalt" or "Altima".

As for your suggestion Ron, I'm not sure that it would work since some of the make/models I would want more than the first word, IE: "Grand Caravan"

Oh that's really cool. I had never heard of fuzzymatch. That was quite simple. Thank you!

FUZZYMATCH is a wrapper I wrote. The magical bit is Levenshtein. You'll find all the code in the modules.

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@Cyiangou

I'm back and I had some additional questions about Fuzzymatch. This function has worked for me about 90-95% of the time, but I still have some issues with it. Take the following examples:

1) Make: Ford Truck. Resolved Make becomes Roadtrek presumably due to the similarities in characters
2) Make: Aveo Special Value. Resolved Make becomes Escalade presumably for the same reason

There are some other examples where due to all of the extra text in the make, it will occasionally match it with an incorrect make.

Thoughts?

Being a 'fuzzy' match, you should expect that it will sometimes make an incorrect choice.

I would try modifying the target makes list to make each of the targets much more specific, even if the makes that are being output are not quite what you need. eg Fordx. After getting an unambiguous match, you can then revert it back to its correct spelling.