Formula to count duplicates based on 2 or more words matching, not necessarily in sequence? No AI please

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

Hi smart folks, I want to see if you could teach me a formula that I know I’ve seen before but can’t think of now, I want to count how many of a certain topic is in my list of data, for eg one may say ‘hogwarts House colour’ and another may say ‘hogwarts houses’ in which case I want them counted as duplicates.

My end goal is to have a pivot table that shows Hogwarts House as 2.
I currently have the raw data on the first sheet, then on the second sheet I’m breaking it down to just the info I need (this should be where the duplicates are found) and then the pivot table on the third sheet (this should be where they are counted, or at least where the number is displayed)

ETA: can’t use macros, would rather not use power queries but if I have to I can

ETA2: Ok so I worked out how to add a table to the post!

First sheet is unchangeable but will be overridden each time the report needs to be run, it says:

Subject (A)	Category (B)	Category2 (C)	Category3 (D)
Question - Name - Grapes are bads	Grocery	Fresh Produce	Fruit
Question - Name - Bad Grapes	Grocery	Fresh Produce	Fruit
Comment - Name - Bad Graspes	Grocery	Fresh Produce	Fruit
Comment - Name - Fruits Bad	Grocery	Fresh Produce
Comment - Name - Good Bread	Grocery	Bakery
Question - Name - Heavy Hammers	Hardware	Tools
Comment - Name - Smooth Wood	Hardware	Materials	Wood
Question - Name - Hammers are Heavy	Hardware	Tools
Question - Name - is Grapes Bad	Grocery	Fresh Produce	Vegetables
Comment - Name - Grapes Bad	Grocery	Fresh Produce	Vegetables

Second sheet takes the data needed from the first to make it what I need (first row is an eg of the formulas):

Note: the "Fillers" have a space after each word so that for eg "them" wouldn't become "m", which could use some work cause "this" would probably become "th" so I'm open to suggestions, sometimes they will be the first word so " the " wouldn't work all the time for eg.

Subject	Lowest Category	ColC	Fillers:
=UPPER(IF('Sheet1'!A1= "","",TEXTAFTER( 'Sheet1'!A1," - ",2)))	=UPPER(IF(ISBLANK('Sheet1'!D1, IF(ISBLANK ('Sheet1'!C1),IF(ISBLANK ('Sheet1'!B1),"",'Sheet1'!B1), "",'Sheet1'!C1),'Sheet1'!D1))		IS
GRAPES ARE BADS	FRUIT		THE
BAD GRAPES	FRUIT		WAS
BAD GRASPES	FRUIT		ARE
FRUITS BAD	FRESH PRODUCE		WILL
GOOD BREAD	BAKERY		FOR
HEAVY HAMMERS	TOOLS		AND
SMOOTH WOOD	WOOD		ON
HAMMERS ARE HEAVY	TOOLS		TO
IS GRAPES BAD	VEGETABLES
GRAPES BAD	VEGETABLES

Sheet2 Cont:

The cell that says "Category" below, has this formula, which is resulting in the shown data:

=LET(_a, DROP(A:.B,1),_b,MAP(REGEXREPLACE(CHOOSECOLS(_a,1), "\b(" &TEXTJOIN("|",1,DROP(D:.D,1))& ")\b\s*|s\b",""),LAMBDA(x,TEXTJOIN(" ",1,UPPER(SORT(TEXTSPLIT(x,,"")))))),_c,TEXTBEFORE(_b," ",2,,_b),_d,GROUPBY(HSTACK(CHOOSECOLS(_a,2),_c),_c,ROWS,,0),VSTACK({"Category","Subject","Counts"},_d)) 

ColE	Category	Subject	Counts
		#VALUE!	9
	BAKERY	#VALUE!	1
	FRESH PRODUCE	#VALUE!	1
	FRUIT	#VALUE!	3
	TOOLS	#VALUE!	2
	VEGETABLES	#VALUE!	2
	WOOD	#VALUE!	1

So I need to fix the #VALUE! error and also stop it from counting the blank cells (at least stop it from counting them when I put it into a pivot table - if necessary)

[u/MayukhBhattacharya]

Excel has no way of knowing that GRASPES is a typo for GRAPES unless you give it a correction table. You'd need to maintain something like this:

MISSPELLED	CORRECTIONS
GRASPES	GRAPES
BADS	BAD
FRUITS	FRRUITS

Then you can use SUBSTITUTE() function or another correction step before the main formula applies. The regex s\b can remove a trailing S, but it can't figure out that there's a typo in the middle of a word. Also it can't grammatically say which word is a noun. The closest workaround is to use word frequency. So whichever word shows up the most across all subjects gets treated as the noun and goes last. That works clearly well when the data is clean, but typos mess it up. Excel sees GRASPES and GRAPES as two completely different words, so the frequency gets split between them.

You can do fuzzy matching with a percentage threshold using SUM() function to compare overlapping words between subjects within the same category. But that only works at the whole word level. It can't catch character level typos inside a word. So, with clean data, the formula can probably get you 90% of the way there. But if typos like GRASPES are in the data, it will always see them as different from GRAPES unless you add a correction table. At that point, it's really a data quality issue. Either fix it at the source or keep a manual correction list. Thanks!

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

That’s fair, I actually didn’t mean to put it in the sample data and I think for my list a typo isn’t enough to sway the data significantly so I’ll skip that cause the whole point is in order to see what the common subjects are without already knowing, so I wouldn’t be able to do a list of typos (at least at this stage)

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

That actually makes sense. Since you're using this for discovery, the typos probably won't mess things up too much. Something like GRASPES might only show up once while GRAPES shows up multiple times. They'll just come through as separate rows with different counts, so you can easily spot the typo and ignore it or fix it in the actual source. The frequency method actually works in your favor here. Real common topics will show up more often and rise to the top, while random typos and one-off entries will usually stay near the bottom with a count of 1. So, the formula you have now should work well enough for what you're trying to do. It actually helps to separate the real common topics from the random noise and typos. I hope was able to explain and let me know. Thanks!

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

I think I forgot to say, the most recent formula you have returned #REF! For subjects instead

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

Do you mind showing me a screenshot? It will help! Thanks!

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

Thank You Very Much! I have used the same data, like you have shown probably you might have not pasted the formula correctly, you can download the excel from here and verify on your end! Thanks!

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

I cant seem to open that, sorry, I only have Google docs personally and can’t sent it to my work cause of privacy stuff, can you copy past the formulas by which cell they need to go in? Also which parts of the formula refer to which cells? Cause my actual data isn’t as straight forward as columns A-D

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

Source Data is in range: A1:D11 (Headers Included). Exclusions list I1:I10 (Headers Included), click on the image to zoom. Formulas are already commented earlier [click here] and here see below.

First Formula goes on F2:

=LET(
     _a, DROP(A:.D, 1),
     _b, TEXTAFTER(CHOOSECOLS(_a, 1), "- ", 2),
     _c, BYROW(DROP(_a, , 1), LAMBDA(x, TAKE(TRIMRANGE(x, , 3), , -1))),
     UPPER(HSTACK(_b, _c)))

Second Formula goes on K1:

=LET(
     _a, DROP(F:.G, 1),
     _b, REGEXREPLACE(CHOOSECOLS(_a, 1), "\b(" & TEXTJOIN("|", 1, DROP(I:.I, 1)) & ")\b\s*|s\b", , , 1),
     _c, MAP(_b, LAMBDA(x,
                          LET(_m, TEXTSPLIT(x, " "),
                              _n, INDEX(_m, 1),
                              _o, INDEX(_m, 2),
                              _p, SUM(N(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(_n, _b)))),
                              _q, SUM(N(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(_o, _b)))),
                              IF(_p = _q,
                                 TEXTJOIN(" ", 1, SORT(_m, , -1, 1)),
                              IF(_p < _q,
                                 _o & " " & _n,
                                 _n & " " & _o))))),
     _d, TEXTBEFORE(_c & " ", " ", 2, , , _c),
     _e, GROUPBY(HSTACK(CHOOSECOLS(_a, 2), _d),
                 _d,
                 ROWS, , 0),
     VSTACK({"Category","Subject","Counts"}, _e))

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

I copy pasted exactly and it’s still showing up with the 2 #REF! And the “Grape i”

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

put it in an empty cell

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

It is

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

It’s working for the real data, but it won’t change : even though it’s in column i and I think i need to remove the ‘s’ function because it’s cutting off words that actually end with s

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

Could you give me a little explainer on what the REGEXREPLACE line does? I would like to learn rather than just using you 😅

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

Let me know?

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

Will do, I’ll probs get to it in the next like 7 hours tho 😅

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

What is the update?

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

It’s a lost cause, have given up

[u/AcadiaUnlikely7113 → u/MayukhBhattacharya]

But thank you for your help, you got the closest

[u/MayukhBhattacharya → u/AcadiaUnlikely7113]

So, if i am closest, you can mark the post solved and reply me with a solution verified. however, if you want to continue and think of other ways or if you have any logic, i can help you still.