sometimes our duplicate finders don't work, meaning we don't actually have exact duplicates. We have John Smith and John Smith, and they're spelled differently. Or we have Blue River, blue River Else, LLC. We have San Francisco as SF or San Francisco. We're looking for fuzzy matches, and I wanna show you that we can build these tools with a few little formulas. So over on the left side, I like to add these as tools. We can just do left and we're gonna take this. Name, and we're just gonna look at the first two letters and we can copy paste this all the way down. And we're just gonna get the first two letters of every single name, and then we're gonna be able to find a fuzzy match . This way we're gonna say match , we're gonna search for Joe or whatever in H two. Comma, we're gonna look for it through the entire column , and we're

going to search for that exact, and now we took a fuzzy part of it, but we're looking for an exact match . And we find it, we find it in its own row. But how do we actually find the ones that match here still, they're still the same. So what we do is we do minus row, and that way we copy and paste it Now. We can take a tool like format , conditional formatting and everything that is less than zero and let's color it red, done. And now we have our fuzzy matches highlighted. We can also do the entire row . So instead of just saying, I, let's say a. And we can then go to custom formula is , and we say equals

dollar sign , I one is less than zero, and let's make that a nicer sort of lower red. There we go. So now the entire row is based off, the color is based off of. The one in our tool are our search or our match here. And now we can see, okay, maybe these two are the exact duplicates and we can start to take, which one do we want? Do we wanna copy paste information there? And do we want to delete this row if we end up deleting the first row? Let's say we don't like these first two, but this third one we like, we can just delete those top two and see there is no more fuzzy match over here. So this helps us do data cleaning way better than just this data . Data clean, remove duplicates, which is just gonna remove a duplicate

in a column or look for all of the columns, the exact duplicates. This one, we just build our own little tool here and we can actually change this. So we can say, Hey, let's look at the street address and if the first, let's say five characters, so we're gonna say D two N five. And copy paste that all the way down. And the search is exactly the same. It's searching just through this H two and saying These are all the same. These are all the same. These two are the same. Okay, great. Actually, we wanna keep this name and this street address, but everything else we want. The bottom one. So we delete that. We are cleaning data and it's making our lives much, much easier than having to figure out each one of these rows all together.

This is really cool. I love making these sort of fuzzy match tools with just a few little formulas, some conditional format formatting , enjoy. You are watching better sheets here on YouTube. Make sure you check out this video or this video and subscribe right now to get more tips, tricks, how tos, get more out of your Google sheets than you ever have before. I'm excited to be making a ton more videos here. Ask me questions down in the comments and I will answer them in future videos. But for right now, right here, one of these videos is gonna be your next Google sheet.