Mr. t

It looks to me like you need another column that you can use for
grouping purposes. Even with thousands of rows you can probably
populate an additional column with a unique name (or donor number)
much more easily than you can come up with a formula that can
distinguish between all the names and versions of names that people
can come up with.

If you started by using advance filtering to filter a list of unique
names to another location, then put the name (or number) you would
want to associate with all versions of that donor's name, then put a
new column in your data base and populated it with a VLOOKUP formula
to pick up the desired name (or number), I think you would find that
you could very easily use SUM, SUMIF, SUMPRODUCT, or a Pivot Table or
someother basic tool of your liking to generate the summary that you
want. You may find that you can clean up your name list with a few
search/replaces, TRIMs, maybe text to columns or some other tools.

People in this group do come up with some really good formulas, so
maybe you will get one that will work for you; but, I think fixing the
source a problem is often better.

Good luck.

Ken
Norfolk, Va

On May 6, 8:04*pm, t_perkins
wrote:
There *will* be duplicate last names, but I'm going to try your suggestion
anyway to see if I can understand how your formula works. *I'll report back
tomorrow -- it's closing time here.

Thanks much!



"RagDyer" wrote:
If you assume that there are *no duplicate* last names, use TTC (Text To
Columns) to create a "helper" column, and have your formula reference that
helper column to perform your calculations.

With data in say A2 to Bn, select A2 to An, and then, from the Menu Bar,
<Data <Text To Columns
Click on "Delimited". then <Next,

Then click on "Space", then <Next,

In the "Data Preview" window, the left most column is selected by default.