Microsoft Excel Tutorial - Compare Cells Using the EXACT Function

In this tutorial I will walk you through how to compare the contents of two cells in Microsoft Excel using the EXACT function. You can use this function in advance ways to achieve more customized results but this tutorial will show the most basic use of this function to compare cells in a Microsoft Excel worksheet.

1. Open Microsoft Excel.

You can create a new workbook to use for this tutorial or use a workbook you already have.

2. Make some random data.

Enter the following datra in the given cells (without quotes):

A1: "football"

A2: "basketball"

A3: "baseball"

B1: "football"

Now you have three rows of data in the A column and one row of data in the B column. You will notice that the only two cells that are the same are A1 and B1 which have "football" in them.

3. Compare the cells.

In cell C1, we will write our exact function formula to compare different cells. The format for the exact function is:

=EXACT(cell1, cell2)

For this example cell1 and cell2 can be any two cells. In cell C1, enter this formula:

=EXACT(A1, A2)

You will notice that the value of C1 one is false. This is because cell A1 (the A1 cell has football) is not equal to cell A2 (the A2 cell has basketball). Now change the formula in C1 to this:

=EXACT(A1, B1)

You will notice now that cell C1 is true. This is a result we want because those two cells are indeed the same (with the "football" in both). Note that you can do this for multiple cells (a list of cells). If you want to compare one cell with a list of cells (compare cell B1 with all the sells A1, A2, and A3), you would use this formula:

=EXACT(A1:A3, B1)

This will give you the value of true whenever B1 and any of the cells A1, A2, or A3 are equal. In this case the value will be true because B1 is equal to A1. The EXACT function that is already built into Microsoft Excel is probably the best way to compare the contents of two cells in the Microsoft Excel worksheet file.

For example, when you compare cells for a worksheet that has a thousand rows and you want to find out if one of those thousand rows is a specific value, you can use this EXACT function to make your job easier.

The EXACT function in Microsoft Excel is the easiest and fastest way to compare the contents between one cell and another cell or between one cell and a list of other cells. You should know that the EXACT function is case sensitive so "this" is different than "this"!