Can excel clean up free-text user entry? - excel

Question

any help would be massively appreciated - I'm really stuck on this.
I have a field on a user entered form that asks people what university they've attended which, due to technical limitations on our system, has to be free text.
This invariably leads to hundreds of different entries for each university, which means I have to use filter on excel and comb through thousands of entries and manually unify - lack of knowledge on how to automate this limits it's practical use massively.
Does anyone know a way we can automate this process of categorizing (and then unifying) different entries which refer to the same thing (e.g someone might put UCL, another might put "university of college, London" and another "university of college london" - I need to teach the system that all 3 are the same and then convert it on excel).
I have a list of the exact entries we want for each university, and I'm happy to manually 'teach' excel when a user entry matches one of these, providing it then learns this for the future (so as time goes on, we have to less and less manual unifying).
Happy to clarify anything, and thanks so much for any help.
Rob

Answer 1

Don't become the victim of user mischief.
Assign a unique ID for each valid response and have the users enter the ID.

Answer 2

Yup...
As you said, you need to do some teaching, here's is the teaching table. Basically just fill up as you go along. You might ask what is UOL, sorry i just crack it out, just for illustration.
And then you have the users inputs (column E), plus 5 calculated columns (F:J)
And now the formulae, I'll show those in row 2 only, the rest are just filled down.
F2 = SUBSTITUTE(E:E," ","*")
G2 = VLOOKUP(E:E,A:B,2,0)
H2 = COUNTIF(A:A,F:F)
I2 = VLOOKUP(F:F,A:B,2,0)
J2 = IFERROR(G2,IF(H2=1,I2,IF(H2=0,"Never seen before","Need validation")))
Basically the logic flow is
do the exact match vlookup of user input in teaching table, if found, then thats it and return the unified name. (Column G)
if the above exact match not found, then we'll proceed to use the star like Helper vallue. Count how many times the HELPER value is found in the teaching table. (Column H)
do the exact match vlookup of helper value in teaching table. (Column I, for use with Column H)
If value in column G is not an error, then use it,
else if value in Column H is 1, then VLOOKUP(HELPER) value is good. If its 0, then you haven't teach excel on the name before. If >2, then it means it need your further attention, the VLOOKUP(Helper) value could be wrong as there are more than one matches.
The trick here is the HELPER column. by replacing blank space with stars, the vlookup now become some sort like vlookup of a sequence of keywords. Doesn't matter how the user's input is, as long as some keywords found and the sequence match, the countif and vlookup return the value.
And at the same time, you also submit an IT enhancement request ! :)