Hey everyone,
I'm not even sure if there's a way to accomplish this at all. I'm working on converting a bunch of Excel files into a database. Failry trivial overall but the largest hurdle i'm running into is that there are either multiple items that are the same thing but spelled incorrectly or a cell might have some extraneous information that should be split into a another cell. Again, it's fairly trivial to find and fix these things but it's becoming incredibly tedious even with built in Excel functions.
I use Matlab extensively for data analysis but now i'm curious if it can help me sort these excel list I have. My intuition says that it's likely more work than it's worth to properly set up an algorithm for each Workbook, since they aren't always in the same format. But then again, it's really just a string computation (possibly the Levenshtein distance algorithm?) and then replacing returned strings and choosing a master string to set all those as. It's probably a bit more complicated if there's a small change in the string (Example: Trim16 or Trim17).
