Hi,

I’m using Excel 2004 for Mac.
I have a whopper of an excel problem, and I don’t have the skills yet to be able to crack it. I’d be so grateful to anyone who could help.

I have a sheet of data, a few thousand rows down by a few dozen columns wide. Each row is data provided by one member of a couple (ie romantic/married). I have matched up most of partners (ie who form a couple) based on other more dependable methods. My goal now is to match up the partners for whom the dependable method didn’t work.

In one of columns (let’s call it A) the person entered the first 3 letters of his/her own name. In the second column (eg, B) the person entered the first 3 letters of his/her partner’s name.

As an example, let’s imagine these are the two columns. I’ll use commas to separate the columns.

bob,jen
jen,bob
abc,cde
fgh,ijk
lmn,opq

The first 2 rows are very possibly a couple. the last 3 rows are clearly not couples. I'd like to identify the rows that are likely couples, such as the 1st and second.

Can anyone figure out a way to do this? So many thanks to anyone who can help!

David