Deleting "non identical" duplicates

[graememyb]

I have an excel worksheet with several hundreds of thousands of "wisdom" quotations in it. The quotation itself and the name of the author are both contained in the same cell.

I've removed all duplicate cells. My challenge now is that there are many occurrences of the same quote; except there's maybe an extra space somewhere or a hyphen in a different place.

To save the time consuming process of sorting and manually deleting, is there some way I can automate a process that finds all records (cells) where there is, say, a 95% match, and then automatically deletes the "near duplicate" cell with the least characters. Maybe I'm being hopeful

Thanks for any help with this query.

[AliGW]

Welcome to the forums!

I shall be flabbergasted, but also full of respect if anyone can provide a macro to do this for you. I'm not a VBA expert, but I can't help thinking that what you are describing will require some fairly complex programming. Hopefully I'm wrong - good luck with this. I'll be watching the thread with interest.

[FDibbins]

Perhaps a start would be to use FIND/REPLACE to remove all hyphens and double-spaces (or TRIM with a helper), then Remove Duplicates again?