The New Fuzzy Matching Feature in Excel's Power Query

There's a new feature in Excel's Power Query and it's the Fuzzy Matching features in the Merge/Joins wizard.

Fuzzy Matching or Fuzzy Merging are when you have to match things like:

Jen and Jenny
Rob and Robert
Rick T. Burns and Rick Burns

These won't match at all via regular joins. But the user has to be careful with the Fuzzy Matching because it's based on a percentage of similarity. Check out the video. You'll see.

#FuzzyDuplicates
#FuzzyMatching
#ExcelFuzzyMatching

For an intro to Get & Transform (Power Query) try my Lynda/LinkedIn course:

My book: Guerrilla Data Analysis 2nd Edition

[Gogloplex]

Yeah, your example is a case of "garbage in/ garbage out". In situations like that, you're never going to get anything particularly accurate. I really like the concept of the fuzzy matching though. I think where it'll shine is in situations where you're trying to match serial numbers; e.g. the S/N is something like but the users just typed in "546809" or "H546809".

[Corbytender]

Literally my favorite channel rn. Love this guy’s stuff.

[cassiusclaudius]

Thank you for reviewing the 0 - 1.0 threshold! Just saved my caboose with 12+ MB of data that was so completely messed up that, under the default setting, was only matching 4 account managers against 58, 000 customer names!!

[wayneedmondson]

Hi Oz.. missed viewing this one last month.. was traveling too. Thanks for all the fuzzy match examples. Thumbs up!

[ca.lakshminarayanreddyjamb]

Thanks for sharing. You are awesome!!!

[orfxkuc]

I am following your excel course on LinkedIn and it leveled my excel skills up. I am stuck with this fuzzy matching because I do not have the fuzzy matching button below join kind. Please advise. I have excel 2016.

[eladiobardelli]

Excelente como siempre, Todo un Hisoka del Excel, saludos desde Chile.

[jacobstromburg]

Kind of a non sequitur but how do you get excel to be white on black?

[JonathanExcels]

Cool. Does Power Query Editor get updated on the same release schedule as Office? I checked and I don't have this fuzzy match option yet.

[simisreekumar]

My “OK” button at the bottom is greyer out. Would you have any insights as to what might be the issue?

[JohnSmith-ctfl]

Can you do a video on external Data? I have been pulling data from the WSJ to a spreadsheet and I could use some tips. Also is there a good way to improve performance because my spreadsheets can be very sluggish sometimes.

[AkaExcel]

new Fuzzy Logic Tool for me. Innovatio!

[barttitulaerexcelbart]

Oz, really interesting stuff. Thank you. Actually this is a situation where man and machine should work together. I can imagine that "yourlist" and "mylist" will be updated frequently. It would be nice if you could give f.e. a 1 for a good match and a 0 for a wrong one. The algorithm should use this new information for the next round. So can you add an extra column in Excel for previously good matches and the fuzy logic first matches what the user agreed on? Have a goof flight Oz, you can think about this in the air...;)

[massms]

I think it will get better soon, just like "Column By Example"
Thanks!

[excelisfun]

That is fuzzy. Always dangerous, though...