[libreoffice-users] Calc - Matching Up Text Fields

Hi all,

I download two files from my banks that have transaction descriptions that
look like so (the one with a * to the left is from Bank #2 - the rest are
from Bank #1):
      PURCHASE AT MY GROCER #NNN, CHARLOTTE, NC ON 050913 FROM CARD#:
XXXXXXXXXXXXNNNN  *   MY GROCER #NNN CHARLOTTE NC
      PURCHASE AT BIG BOX NNNN, CHARLOTTE, NC ON 050413 FROM CARD#:
XXXXXXXXXXXX1113      MERCHANT PAYMENT BIG BOX ANNNN AT LOC NNNNNN BIG BOX
ANNNN PINEVILLE Charlotte NC

Notice the way two transactions at BIG BOX are referred to in two different
ways - one includes a date, while the other does not.  Also, all series of
"N"s & "X"s above are numbers.

My database has payee names like so:
entity_id  |  entity_name
01        |  My Grocer
02        |  Big Box

I want to prep the bank data and create a fresh CSV file, so as to cull out
some of the unnecessary data and create a fresh CSV file for importing into
my back-end DB.  Ideally, I can automagically match the entity name from
the description field to the entity name in my DB.  My question is (or
maybe questions are):

If I have the ID in ColA and the Name in ColB (from my DB), I want to put
the description list (from the banks) in ColE and be able to match payee
names and have the ID copied to ColD.  Even if I have to create a separate
column for each bank's description style, that's still gotta be better than
trying to manually match up transaction data from my bank to what I have in
my DB.

I thought about VLOOKUP, but that seems to not work at all when I try it
using text fields.  I can make that work in another project where I have
barcodes.  In that case, the barcodes make a solid primary key field to
work with.  In this case, I have no such animal - and need to match the
text fields in order to get that PK.  So perhaps VLOOKUP is not the best
way.  Is there another function that will let me do this, and how does it
work?

Thanks!
-- 
D.C. Parris, FMP, Linux+, ESL Certificate
Minister, Security/FM Coordinator, Free Software Advocate
http://dcparris.net/
<https://www.xing.com/profile/Don_Parris><http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcparris>
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