Microsoft has launched a new add-in for Excel called Fuzzy Lookup that is supposed to help you with the problem of identifying and matching textually similar string data in Excel (e.g. when importing data). Oddly enough this relates to the ‘data scrubber’ point I made in my last post, although Microsoft rather primly refer to the process as ‘data cleaning‘.
I thought it was amusing that the first bug fix relates to incoming decimal points:
An updated version of the add-in has just been released. It fixes a bug that was causing the tool to fail on systems where the default numeric format for decimal values is configured to use something other than “.” as the decimal separator.
Those pesky foreigners using ‘,’ when we all know a decimal point is ‘.’ goddammit.
You can clarify the fuzziness of this post by going to the Contextures blog where you will find lots more helpful information about using the fuzzy add-in. Specs optional.
Tags: Excel
