similar names - two spreadsheets

I have two spreadsheets. 1 has the names of new customers and 1 has names of
prospects. I want to figure out if a prospect became a customer, but the
names may be similar and not identical. Is there a way to compare
information from one spreadsheet to another and pinpoint items that are
similar?

You could add a column on both sheets called "Matchkey". That
concatenates, for example, the first five characters of the last name,
the first character of the first, name, and the zip code, or phone
number.

Then compare the matchkey fields.

Thank you, for your response. I don't follow the "Matchkey" suggestion. How
would that work? The names are company names. One might have US Systems and
the other U. S. Systems. Is there a way to compare the names and match
similarities? I don't have address and zip codes on both spreadsheets, only
company names.

"dan dungan" wrote:

You could add a column on both sheets called "Matchkey". That
concatenates, for example, the first five characters of the last name,
the first character of the first, name, and the zip code, or phone
number.

Then compare the matchkey fields.

Well, in that case, you could copy each list so you have a backup of
the data, select the column and delete spaces, commas and periods.
then compare the lists with the Match function.