I just found this site and it looks like a great resource.

Our company has a customer list that we received from a "buying group" and we want to compare it to our current account list. We know we sell some of the accounts in the list, but we would like to make sure we can verify the ones we sell and the ones we do not. The challange is that I can not find any field in our database that matches exactly (unique) to the "buying group" account list. The company names may be abreviated, the tel #'s may have () in our system but not in their list. The only common fields are city & Zip. I tried the Vlookup function, but it finds cells with multiple references to the same city or zip.

We have 3000 accounts total, the "buying group" list has 2500 accounts. There may be only 50 or 60 accounts from the "buying group" that we sell. Our other accounts are not in the buying group.

Is is possible to cross-reference the lists without doing it account by account?