Find approximate matches using the formula tool

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to go through a database and find approximate matches within a description column. For example, for the following data:

DescriptionQtyBananas yellow6Bannaas green188907 Strawberies77Strawberries punnetted order ID 768900Ananas colombian  20

I want to use a filter to extract any items with words in the description spelled similarly to "banana" - that would include "Bananas", "Bannaas" and "Ananas".

I understand there's a Fuzzy Match tool, but the descriptions in my actual database are much longer and I want to hone in on an approximate match to a single word, instead of the whole Description field, as above.

Any guidance would be appreciated - thanks in advance!

eleee3 · Answer

Apologies @ShankerV, I'm not able to upload anything due to my company's confidentiality policy.

I can say that I have descriptions of up to 80 characters, and when doing the equivalent of the "bananas" search, I would get results which would be the equivalent of "strawberry MacDonald farms invoice overdue".

Perhaps if you explained what each step of the workflow does, I may be able to amend on my end?

ShankerV · Answer

Hi @eleee3

Sure, can you please share few examples to look into it.

It will help me to tweak the workflow.

Many thanks

Shanker V

eleee3 · Answer

Hey @ShankerV, I've just run your solution through my whole dataset and it's returning too many matches - is there a way to make it slightly more specific? In some instances, it's not even returning Descriptions containing remotely similar - e.g., it would return a Description containing "tomato" when looking for "banana".