Is there way to find duplicate words? - vba

Question

I'm trying to find/make a program that will find all my duplicate words in Excel. For example in A1 "someone" in A2 ""person" and etc but I'll have "someone" multiples times or another word and I need to condense that information together. But I need to do it in a way where I don't search manually to concatenate duplicates. So is there a way to find the duplicate words and concatenate them?
I have also been looking into doing it using "FIND" to look for them but it has yielded no luck yet. I also have been using the "FILTER" but I don't know a way to condense the duplicates without doing it manually. I also been wondering where you can find the code for functions like "FIND, REPLACE and ect."? If I could find that I could change the coding for "REMOVE DUPLICATES" to change it for words. But hey I don't really know if that really would work or not. Anything would help.
For example:
column1 column2 column3
-----------------------------
y A (nothing)
z B (nothing)
z (nothing) I
x (nothing) k
y (nothing) j
x C (nothing)
to this
column1 column2 column3
-----------------------------
y A j
z B I
x C k
except the letters are words.

Answer 1

I don't know if you could do this with formulas in Excel unless you know what word you are looking for within the cell. You could try either a UDF, or a Regular Expression.
my question and answer with links might get you started:
StackOverflow: formula to see if a surname is repeated within a cell
and maybe:
VBA Express
Once you've posted your Excel worksheet with data we see if I've got it wrong!

Answer 2

You could use advanced filter to copy unique values from column 1 to a new column. Then you would use a vlookup formula to get the rest.
Assumptions:
Row 1 is a header row so actual data starts in row 2
Column1 is column "A"
Column2 is column "B"
Column3 is column "C"
The new column with the unique values is column "E".
In cell F2 and copied over to G2 and then down as needed:
=INDEX(INDEX($B$2:$C$7,0,COLUMNS($E2:E2)),MATCH(1,INDEX(($A$2:$A$7=$E2)*(INDEX($B$2:$C$7,0,COLUMNS($E2:E2))<>""),),0))

Answer 3

Sheet1 Before:
Code:
Sub Macro1()
With Sheet1
.Columns("A:A").AdvancedFilter Action:=xlFilterCopy, _
CriteriaRange:=.Range("F1:F2"), CopyToRange:=.Range("K1"), Unique:=True
.Columns("B:B").AdvancedFilter Action:=xlFilterCopy, _
CriteriaRange:=.Range("G1:G2"), CopyToRange:=.Range("L1"), Unique:=True
.Columns("C:C").AdvancedFilter Action:=xlFilterCopy, _
CriteriaRange:=.Range("H1:H2"), CopyToRange:=.Range("M1"), Unique:=True
End With
End Sub
Sheet1 After:
make sure field names are used.

Answer 4

This will give you a function that will find the first non-blank cell against a specific string
Option Explicit
Function NonBlankLookup(SearchTxt As String, LookIn As Range, OffSetRows As Long) As Variant
Dim loc As Range
Dim FirstFound As Range
Set loc = LookIn.Find(what:=SearchTxt)
While Not (loc Is Nothing)
If Not IsEmpty(loc.Offset(0, OffSetRows)) Then
NonBlankLookup = loc.Offset(0, OffSetRows).Value
Exit Function
End If
If FirstFound Is Nothing Then
Set FirstFound = loc
ElseIf loc = FirstFound Then
NonBlankLookup = CVErr(2000)
Exit Function
End If
Set loc = LookIn.Find(what:=SearchTxt, after:=loc)
Wend
NonBlankLookup = CVErr(2000)
End Function
to use, insert this code into a module, then in your excel spreadsheet, you can use a formula like =NonBlankLookup(E1,$A$1:$A$6,1) which will search for your text in A1:A6, and check 1 column to the right. If no text is found that matches the search string, or if the text is found but no data exists in the specified column, #NULL! is returned.
This also has a slight advantage to vlookup, as it will allow negative offset, so you could have the search text in column 2, and by using -1 for the offset, you could return data from column 1
Just so you are aware, because of the way that .find works, when you specify a range, it will start at the 2nd cell, and go down, and search the first cell you give it last.
e.g. with my example of A1:A6, it will search A2,A3,A4,A5,A6 and finally A1