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I have an Excel spreadsheet and would like to compare
columns B and E (both contain text strings) on a ROW by ROW basis.

In other words, I only care whether the data in column B row 3
matches column E row 3- I don't care if the same string is on a DIFFERENT row, only if it is on the same row I am currently comparing.
Therefore I don't think a VLOOKUP is the way to go here.

I have looked online for a bit, and tried a simple formula I found on a an Excel forum:
=IF(B3<>E3,"N"," ")
This is supposed to print N if the values don't match.
I couldn't get it to work - it always printed N, even when the text was identical.
I tried using the TEXT and STRING functions, but couldn't get it to work.

Since I am pressed for time, I wanted to ask for help here, rather than spend the next hour looking online.

Thanks!

Try this:

=IF(NOT(D18=E18), "Not Equal", "Equal")

Slim

Not to worry, it was because of the leading and trailing spaces
not matching up.
TRIM did the trick.

Thanks anyway!

CowboySlim wrote:Try this:

=IF(NOT(D18=E18), "Not Equal", "Equal")

Slim

Thanks Slim!
I posted my reply above, without realizing you had replied already.

The problem turned out to be that the leading and trailing spaces were being counted, so there was never a match, since the two spreadsheets the values were copied into one from didn't have the EXACT same formatting.

Sometimes copy and paste bring trailing characters into Excel that you don't see, like copy and paste from a cell in a Word document table. That's right then you have to do a character count and a trim, or sometimes I use Right or Left function.

Slim