I had 2 columns, one was an Vendor Name, the 2nd was the Vendor Address but it also contained the Vendor Name. I needed to strip out the Vendor Name which would leave me with the Vendor Address without the Name.
For example if one column had "Con Ed", the next column had "Con Ed 123 Street, New York, NY 11111", I needed to replace "Con Ed" with null and just have "123 Street, New York, NY 11111" in a column.
Here's what I did and I will also let you know what you can do to accomplish your goal.
First I created a new column and set that to the Length (using the LEN() function) of the Vendor Name.
Then I created another new column and set that to the length of the Vendor Address.
A third column and was set to use the Right() function. Where the text is the Vendor Address and the length is the Length of the Address minus the length of the Vendor Name.
So consider: "Con Ed 123 Street, New York, NY 11111"
1st column: (Length of Vendor): len(Con Ed) = 6
2nd column: (Length of Vendor address): len(Con Ed 123 Street, New York, NY 11111) = 37
3rd Column: Right([Vendor Address], 31 (37-6)) = ", New York, NY 11111"
Lastly I just applied the TRIM function to the 3rd column.
In your case you would just want to use the Concatenate function to append the the original column & the new column.
So in summary you'll have the below columns:
Column 1: Names:
(Smith,Jones,Taylor)
Column2: IDs:
(Smith_ID,Taylor_B,Jones_C)
Column3: Len([Names])
Column4: Len([IDs])
Column5: The "replace" function
= TRIM(Right([IDs], ([Column4] -[Column3] ))
Column6: String put back together
=Concatenate([Column3],[Column5])
=LEFT(B5,SEARCH("_",B5)-1)Then you can use vlookup on those two columns to return the matching id for each value in your list of last names (assuming of course they're all unique and your ID's all follow that same pattern)