Excel for Office 365: Fuzzy Matches with the Power Query Editor by Chris Menard

Use a fuzzy match in Power Query to do approximate matches (fuzzy matches) in Excel for Office 365. Example: you want to compare the names of employees, and you have in a master list containing Christopher Menard, and in another list, you have Chris Menard or Christopher A. Menard. If you have exact matches you could use VLOOKUP or the new XLOOKUP function in Excel. If you had a pattern you could do VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP with a wildcard. But in our exercise we have neither exact matches nor do we have a pattern.

Bookmarks for fuzzy query:
00:00 Introduction and a look at my data
01:39 Covert both ranges to tables
02:30 Use Power Query Editor and select only create connection for both tables
03:45 Merge the tables together
04:00 Fuzzy matching starts
05:08 Fuzzy matching options
06:15 Fuzzy match defaults - 0 to 1 and 0.80 is the default
07:00 Expand the Power Query field for table 2
07:50 Close and Load to - new worksheet

Using the Power Query Editor, fuzzy matching will show you how many matches, and you can tweak the setting to get more matches. Other examples where you can use fuzzy matches are for products, customers, clients, employees, and account codes.
Fuzzy matching has a similarity threshold. The range is from 0 to 1. By default, it is 0.80. Zero (0) means everything will match; one (1) is an exact match.

#excel #powerquery #microsoftexcel

Chris Menard's Blog post of Fuzzy Matches:

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[ismaelchabani]

Another great tutorial.
Thank you for saving me so much time Chris!

[kimberleymunteanu]

thanks so much! this was a huge help. Didn't need the Fuzzy part, but everything worked without it - yay!!

[roywilson]

Thanks Chris, nice video, very useful.

[welsonte]

how to do the fuzzy options in excel power query 2016?

[juanpablobarron]

Hi. Congrats, great example and tutorial. Is any option to include the mact % within outcome received?

[resadsahverdizade]

I did the same steps as you did but there is one problem I cant see " Use Fuzzy Matching to perform the merge" could you please help me?