So we have 2 excel files. one contains medicare numbers for all acute care
facilities in the United states (.xls) and the second is a list of our
clients that we need to match the medicare number to. (xls as well) we are
working with nearly 8,000 records at this point. going through each record
one by one is tedious and is consuming too much time and resources. We are
aware of vlookup but the names listed on each sheet are slightly different
(Street may appear as St. and so on)

Is there a way to automate the matching with either excel or some third
party software?

Cricketlang wrote:
So we have 2 excel files. one contains medicare numbers for all acute care
facilities in the United states (.xls) and the second is a list of our
clients that we need to match the medicare number to. (xls as well) we are
working with nearly 8,000 records at this point. going through each record
one by one is tedious and is consuming too much time and resources. We are
aware of vlookup but the names listed on each sheet are slightly different
(Street may appear as St. and so on)

Is there a way to automate the matching with either excel or some third
party software?

IME this sort of problem does not have a one-size-fits-all solution, so
please provide a small sample set of data that highlights the issues.

Obfuscate all PHI, of course.