Filtering large columns of text based on keywords

Hello everyone,

I have been given a task in the office which I don't have any idea how to complete. I'm decent at low level excel (using IF formulas, pivot tables etc) but I feel like this might be over my head and I'm panicking slightly.

Basically, I've been given a data dump of details from a database, and have 12,000 cells of free text I need to filter through based on keywords, or more likely key phrases. Does anyone know of a way I could filter it, based on key phrases. I need to filter based on those that do or don't have 'Non communal parking', or 'Keys onsite' for example.

In addition, the problem is this has all been entered by dozens of different people, so the text isn't uniform; I need to clean up the data as much as possible. What would people suggest I do to clean the information as much as possible before I filter based on phrases as mentioned above? I'd like to avoid having to manually go through every cell if possible.

If anyone has any idea or can point me in the right direction I'd be exceedingly grateful. Thankyou for your time.

Best Regards,

Yog

Can you get a small sample in excel for us.

Are the keywords part of a longer text in the cell with that keyword?
is there any table like structure?

some general tips to get started:
- finding all locations for keywords can be done with Find (CTRL+F) type the keyword and choose find all to get a list of location under the search
- In Autofilter you can also type keywords and then filter those rows
- you can setup Conditional formatting for cells with (or without) a keyword using wildcards "*keyword*" to find it in a text.

- add columns for each keyword and use a countif to count the no of occurances in that row f.e.

Formula:

=COUNTIF(A2:Z2;"*Non communal parking*")

and logicly if you have 26 columns and 10 have non communal parting then you can substract 10 from 26 to know that 16 cells are without that keyword on that row