Mark similar but not identical text strings

[n_ant]

Hi all,

I am working with some text strings in Excel. These are news items, to be precise. Before proceeding with the analysis, I need to omit some data that is not correct. I have already removed all the duplicate values. The problem is that there are still some values like:

B1: Libya restarts southern oil field.
B2: Libya restarts southern oil field. <p><a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CO75vQ4piJ9lTeivpP7wIer7Phw/0/da

These are exactly the same news items, they are published by the same newspaper, yet they cannot be removed as being duplicates since they are slightly different. Is there any way to mark these so that it can be seen that they relate to the same stuff.

Thank you very much in advance!

[FDibbins]

If the "duplicates" will always be in that kind or format, you could add a helper column and extract, say, the 1st 35 characters, and then do a countif() based on that - sort on >1 and then you can see what are probably the duplictes

[shg]

Find and replace <*> with nothing?

[n_ant]

Good stuff, thank you