Uncovering similar text in cells

[titushanke]

Hi there, I have a small project where individuals need to submit a survey reply. However, I want to chase people that just copy & paste their replies into the survey or just slightly modify them.
Therefore, I would like to uncover the "similarity %" of text in various rows.

Example:

cell a1: The dog has a long tail.
cell a2: The dog has quite a long tail.
cell a3: The cat has grey eyes.

Affirmation 1 and 2 are very similar although not identical. What suggestions do you have for me to uncover these, as they are not identical but sill too similar to be considered different?

I have a list with around 1000 responses and, I would like to uncover those that are very similar to others.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Titus

[StevenM]

You might want to take a look at the following:

http://www.excelforum.com/excel-prog...detection.html
http://www.excelforum.com/excel-gene...ercentage.html

[Richard Buttrey]

Hi,

How long is a piece of string?

Basic Excel does not have any sort of fuzzy analysis. It could also be said that a3 is similar since it mentions an animal and an adjective describing one of its organs, but I suspect you don't classify that as similar.

Only if you can define some very specific rules would you have any chance of achieving some textual analysis but in reality I doubt that you can easily achieve this with Excel.