Match Category ID's to Campaign Names with inexact vlookup matches.

Hey everyone,
I've done quite a bit of searching around but just can't find an answer to my problem.

I have several Campaign Names (about a thousand) and about 25000 categories (with ID's) to choose from and would like to assign the Category ID's to the Campaign Names without doing manual searches. My problem is that the names are not similar enough for vlookup and I didn't get any usable results with the fuzzy lookup add in either.

I will attach an example of both my Campaign and my Category file for reference.

Thanks a lot!

This formula in G2:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP("*"&TRIM(MID(F2,4,LEN(F2)-16)),A:B,2,0),"")

and copied down will give you all but one of the IDs, but I suspect that is down to the regularity of your sample data and that in your real data there would be far fewer matches found.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Hey Pete,
Thanks for your solution but unfortunately the real data is way less regular than the samples I gave. I'm thinking of maybe creating a VBA script to adress my problem but I'm not entirely sure if I'll manage. Something that looks for matching words might just work.