Cleaning strings effectively (power query)

[Anonymous]

Hi guys,

I have a list of names from two different sources, but they are not exactly the same. Unfortunately, there is no consistent way to split the name based on a delimiter and then pick only the first and surname, because there are inconsistencies in these areas as well.

What are the possibilities in either dax or m to clean data like this?


Example:

Source 1:
Daniel L Jones
Meredith Anne Summer
Chloe Lemaire-Trudeau 
Martin van Hubert

Source 2:
Daniel Jones
Anne Summer
Chloe Lemaire
Martin van der Hubert 

[v-eachen-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

I studied the examples you provided below and can't find an inherent rule for cleaning. As a workaround, you could use other fields(like unique ids) to match them.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

I manage to fix it by doing:

-A fuzzy merge (join) of the names from the two sources
-Create ID's (index)
-Join these to the fact table