Not to be obtruse and dense and stuff, but... since I'm comparing a LN
to a LN, (note comma)FN MI format, wont ALL of them have an error
message? hmmm? BTW, the concatenated list has lots of mismatches
because differences in FN's and MI's, IE: Murphy, John vs. Murphy,
Johnny J. and that kind of thing.

So, if I can use the IF(iserror(vlookup formula, how do I really write
this, please? Not trying to be a pain, but with these formulas, one
wrong paranthsis or colon and it's a failure, and I'm not that skilled
with more complicated formulas.

Isn't here a way to compare the first few characters of the LN column
to the first few charaters of the LN,FN MI column? maybe using LEN or
ISNA?? Since this is a short list, there are no duplicates in the
first 4 characters of each LN.

It would be ideal to compare the "textstring and-then-space" cell to
the "teststring up to comma" cell with a formula, that would give the
cleanest dataset. Can anyone suggest a formula that will do this? Too
bad Excel is so crappy at this kind of thing (and PLEASE, nobody
suggest a macro! those are IMPOSSIBLE for me!)

any help is truly appreciated


Mark in Boston


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