I have 2 spreadsheets. One contains ~5000+ names with about 30 corresponding information fields. The other spreadsheet has the names of ~2500 people whose data I need. To manually copy/paste/delete this job would takes weeks of mind-numbing work.

I thought of taking my larger list and just deleting names that didn't match exactly, but I wasn't sure how to efficientlydo this, and then I thought of just doing a string search, but since there are over 50 smiths, johnsons etc, I wasn't sure if this would be accurate.

Can anyone think of a good way to tackle this problem?