Sorry - you misunderstand. It's actually far easier in Excel if we do restrict it to exact matching, or at least partial matching.

Having it so that, e.g. if a user types in "Rob" and expects to see all entries returned for "Rob", "Robin", "Robert" or even "Nairobi" is not so much a problem, but inexact matching is not so straightforward, e.g. so that a search entry of "McGowan", if not found, would return "MacGowan" (if it existed).

If you're fine with the first option, you still need to decide which one you'd prefer (exact only or exact and partial) - you might decide that it's actually undesirable that all options containing "Rob" are returned, and force it to return an exact match for that string only.

Sorry for all the questions - hopefully there won't be too many more.

Regards