Is it possible to group names by fuzzy logic?

[kalos]

Hello!

My data has several client names. It is very often that there are several names of the group of one client.

For example, Batavia Insurance, Batavia Fund, etc probably belong to the Batavia group.

It would mostly work if I match the first word, so how could I write an Excel function to group/count entries that their cell has the same first word?

But it is not 100% safe, eg when you have PT Batavia Company and a prefix kills your algo.

I know it will never be 100% accurate, but do you have any idea how to approach this?

Thanks!

[NetRunner]

Download Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15011

[IainB]

Download Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15011

Nice find! Looks interesting.   

I downloaded it to try it out, but I have Win10-64 Pro and MS Office Excel 2016 and noticed that that wasn't covered (not necessarily forwards compatible) in the page The Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel performs fuzzy matching of textual data in Excel, where it says:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images, with my emphasis.)

Supported Operating System
Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista

Preinstalled Software (Prerequisites): Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010 or 2013
1 GHz processor, 1 core or higher
1 GB of RAM
2 GB of available hard disk space
The following libraries are required and will be installed if necessary:
.NET 4.5
VSTO 4.0

As a long-time Excel ASAP Utilities user, I couldn't seem to get any joy from site:asap-utilities.com/ "fuzzy" either.
Still, I shall try this one out (suck-it-and-see). Stuff from Microsoft Labs is usually pretty tolerant.