basically, the task at hand is to have a formula in workbook 'a' search
workbook 'b' for specific data, and total up a sum.

sort of. what's happening is the workbook a is a large list of different
customers, and workbook b is a list of sales orders, more or less. Now, both
are huge documents, and some significant issues lie in the way that the sales
orders are recorded (ie: while customer 'john smith' exists in both
workbooks, workbook a will have 'john smith' and b might have 'j smith' or
some other sort of variation)

I was trying to run an 'if' statement for this, and it makes sense in
programming language (at least to me) but because i've got text based values,
it returns false.

the shear number of different data types i need to pull is making it unable
to do a vlookup. since the sales orders list multiple products, and the
workbook a is showing the product family.

i have no idea if this even makes sense to explain. but if anyone gets what
i'm after, any help would be great. Thanks!