How to Do Fuzzy Matching in Google Sheets: A Step-by-Step Guide

At a Glance: The Short Answer

Fuzzy matching in Google Sheets means finding approximate matches between two columns, such as matching "Acme Corp" against "Acme Corporation" or "Sarah Johnson" against "Sarah Johnston". Google Sheets has no built-in function for this, so you have two realistic paths.

You can approximate it with formulas, normalising text and comparing tokens, but this is fragile and only handles predictable variations. For real fuzzy matching, an add-on like Flookup Data Wrangler compares columns directly and returns the best match with a similarity score.

This guide walks through both approaches and shows the Flookup workflow step by step.

What Is Fuzzy Matching?

Fuzzy matching compares strings for similarity rather than equality. Two values are a match when they are close enough, even if they are not identical. Typical differences include typos, abbreviations, order changes, missing words and case or punctuation variations.

You need fuzzy matching whenever your data describes the same real-world entity in slightly different ways:

• Matching a supplier list against a master vendor list.
• Linking customer records from two merged databases.
• Finding near-duplicate rows inside one sheet.
• Mapping imported product names to a catalogue.

The output of a fuzzy match is usually a score, such as 0.92 out of 1, that tells you how confident the tool is. You can set a threshold and only accept matches above it.

Formula-Based Approaches

If your variations are predictable, you can get partway with formulas. The most common tricks:

• LOWER(TRIM(cell)) to neutralise case and surrounding spaces.
• SUBSTITUTE to remove specific punctuation, like hyphens or periods.
• REGEXREPLACE to strip patterns, such as company suffixes or trailing text.
• Comparing first words with LEFT or splitting into tokens to check that key words match.

These work when you know exactly what the variations are. If every company name ends in "Inc" or "LLC" in different forms, you can strip those suffixes and compare the rest. But the approach breaks down the moment your data contains variations you did not predict, which is the normal case.

Why Formulas Fall Short

Formula-based matching fails on the exact cases fuzzy matching exists for. A typo like "Johnsone" versus "Johnson" defeats any keyword comparison. Reordered names, "Johnson Sarah" versus "Sarah Johnson", need token-level logic you would have to script. And similarity scoring, deciding that "Acme Corp" is 90 percent similar to "Acme Corporation", is not something a spreadsheet formula can compute.

For simple, predictable cleaning, formulas are fine. For genuine fuzzy matching, you need an algorithm that compares strings by similarity, and that is what the Flookup add-on provides.

Fuzzy Matching with the Flookup Add-on

Flookup Data Wrangler is a Google Sheets add-on available from the Google Workspace Marketplace . It adds three tools you can use for fuzzy matching:

• Fuzzy Match: compare a search column against a reference column and return the closest match with a similarity score.
• Smart Deduplicate: find near-duplicate groups inside a single column or range.
• Text Standardisation: clean up casing, punctuation and formatting before you match.

The free plan includes fuzzy matching, so you can start without paying. There is no formula to write and no scripting, the matching runs inside the spreadsheet.

Step-by-Step: Match Two Columns

Here is how to fuzzy match two columns with Flookup:

1. Install the add-on. Open Extensions > Add-ons > Get add-ons, search for Flookup and install it.
2. Open Fuzzy Match. From the Flookup sidebar, choose the Fuzzy Match tool.
3. Select your search column. This is the column of values you want to look up, for example your incoming supplier list.
4. Select your reference column. This is the master list you want to match against.
5. Run the match. Flookup returns the closest match for each row plus a similarity score.
6. Review confidence. Filter for low scores and decide whether to accept, adjust the threshold or review manually.

The similarity score is the key to control. Set a high threshold for conservative matching or a lower one for aggressive recall, then review the edge cases.

Fuzzy Deduplication in Sheets

Fuzzy matching is also how you find duplicate rows inside one sheet. Instead of comparing two columns, you look for rows that describe the same entity.

Flookup's Smart Deduplicate runs four detection strategies, exact case-insensitive matching, punctuation normalisation, phonetic similarity and fuzzy percentage matching, and groups results ranked by confidence. How to remove duplicates in Google Sheets covers the full workflow.

Final Thoughts

Fuzzy matching in Google Sheets is easy once you stop trying to build it from formulas. Install the add-on, pick your columns and review the similarity scores. The matching runs in seconds, and you keep full control over which results you accept.

For a deeper look at how the underlying algorithms work, see fuzzy matching algorithms explained .