For calculation purposes I designed an excel sheet which is developed bit by bit over the years. To be able to calculate faster i started preselecting from old calculations, so positions only needed to be checked and adapted instead of started from scratch.
This started with VLookup in one old calculation and is developed to fuzzylookup that now first searches in a preselected old calculation and then, in case nothing is found searches in an archive that contains up to 25.000 calculated positions. Depending on how well the example fits and the amounts of positions we save 30 to 70 % calculation time and the process takes between 3 minutes and an hour. Fuzzy lookup in 25000 cells takes about 10-15 seconds per search.
A programmer recently advised me to use an inverted index instead of fuzzy lookup. Each position contains a description of 2 to 15 words for which the best fitting match is being searched. Is implementing an inverted index worth the trouble looking both at speed and accuracy? And is it hard to implement an inverted index in excel?
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