need help... compare 2 different excel files

[captaind]

Here is exactly what I need to do... I dont know if access can do this, or excel or some other program. I have 2 different excel files that bost contain names of people... a cell for last names and a cell for first names. The 2 files are always having names added. What I need to do is take file A and have it take every first and last name and do a search to see if those names exsist in file B. For instance lets say file A had the name John Doe I dont want to know every John in file B all I want to know is if John Doe exsist in file B but I need to know if all names in file A match with B... file B usually contain 60,000 names and it grows by the hundreds every day, and file A has a couple thousand names that grows a little every day. We want to make sure the names on file A are not on file B. How can this be done? Keep in mind I cannot change the format of either file because another agency creates these files.

 

[Mile-O]

How do you differentiate between different people with the same name?

 

[captaind]

I dont know... I need it to do an exact match based on first and last name, and give me a report and flag those names... but like I said because John Doe in in one list I dont want to see every John in the other... I just want to see if John Doe is there

 

[Mile-O]

To begin with you can either:

• Link to both spreadsheets via the link table method;
• Import both spreasheets into tables using the TransferSpreadsheet method

Then you can use the Find Duplicates Query Wizard.

 

[zdog]

You could add a new column in both the excel worksheets called concatenatedname, first name&last name.
You can then do a vlookup on that column in excel itself to check if the full name exists in both files.