Excel Compare Two Columns Strings

Excel Compare Two Columns Strings

This isn't really an IT problem per se but I do a lot of work in Excel and knowing a few tricks can save you a hell of a lot of time.

I am making a report and there are multiple fields that look the same in Active Directory. But in actual fact, we have two that usually are identical except for when someone changes name (e.g. getting married) we only change the one of them.

Now I went and created a report and put in the wrong column. I needed another column. So I wanted to find out where they did not match i.e. the exceptions when someone has had a name change.

To compare two columns that contains strings (text), you can use the exact function:

e.g.

=EXACT(a1,b1)

This will return "TRUE" if a1 and b1 are the same.