The Excel Lab: Soundex Search

Every once in a while, I have a spreadsheet that sits in my ‘lab’ for way too long. At a certain point, I have to admit that I’m never going to finish it completely or do a full blog post on it. I’ve decided just to release one such spreadsheet as is. Perhaps you will be the one to carry it forward? (or, write to tell me I’ve wasted my time?)

Soundex Search

I while ago, I read about a phonetic algorithm called Soundex. Soundex is useful (well, there’s some argument about that) for searching through a list of surnames while compensating for common misspellings in those names. Using a dummy dataset and UDF developed by Richard Yanco, I created the following:

As the animation demonstrates, you can type in your search term into the ActiveX textbox and both the listbox and graph will automatically update to show you relevant search results and corresponding values. I’ve added some additional search functionality beyond Soundex as well. For each name in the dataset, I’ve assigned a random value to plot.

I’m rather unconvinced of the usefulness of this. I’ll put it you to see if you have any luck with it. For what it’s worth, the mechanism is formula driven. I didn’t use VBA except to set the original Soundex values for each surname (which, you could also probably do without VBA if you were so inclined.)

Download the source file:

soundex.xlsm