Match Help... A Doosy

**chrisfreeman** · 03-23-2012, 02:04 PM

I have exhausted my knowledge of Excel and need some help.

I am trying to compare two columns of data to find duplicates. We will call them column A and column B.

#1 When I try to match column A to column B it finds some matches but misses quit a few
#2 If I try to match column B to column A it finds the ones that #1 misses but misses the ones that #1 found.

I have no idea why this is happening.

FYI… I typically use the match formula: if(iserror(match(A2,B:B,0)),””,1) to find duplicates. However, I have also tried COUNTIF with the same result. I have checked to make sure that both columns use the same data type and I have trimmed.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

**bebo021999** · 03-23-2012, 02:08 PM

You can try:
=IF(COUNTIF(B:B,A2),1,0)

**haru** · 03-23-2012, 02:10 PM

Can you post a dummy file? I would like to see why those formulas don't work.

**chrisfreeman** · 03-23-2012, 02:22 PM

I actually just figured it out.

It had to do with the way excel was writing the formula when I would select column B or vice versa. I had to manually enter column B as B:B instead of dragging to select it... weird

Thanks for your quick responses though...