Hi all. So it turns out that our database is seriously unstandardised because of people inputting things as they feel like it. For instance, one piece of data might be "Chateau Pontet Canet" and then the next time someone puts in a record for this he or she puts "Chateau Pontet-Canet" with a hyphen. Or maybe they put in an accent the first time on an "e", and then forget it another time.

This all makes organising data a nightmare. Is there any way to get excel to recognise such similar files as being the same, or is there a way to get it to standardise these all - so change say "Chateau Pontet Canet", "Chateau Pontet-Canet" and Chateau Pontet-Canet(Bordeax)" all to "Chateau Pontet Canet" without having to go through manually and do it (I have about 15,000 files which have this problem!). At the very least, is there anyway for excel to highlight or group similar cells together - e.g. cells with the first 5 characters the same which I could then examine?

Thank you so so much to anyone who has a solution to this: I think I might die if I have to look through every single row!