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I need to join data from an Excel Spreadsheet to a Point feature class.

Namely, matching up Addresses from one piece of data to another, and then appending the rest of the data once the addresses match up.

The "Joins & Relates" tool worked fine, however, I was unable to specify how many characters should be considered a "Match" for the join.

I would like to be able to tell the tool that if 70% of all the characters match, or whatever, that should be considered a good match.

I apologize if my phrasing is off, but I hope I was able to get the point across.

I want to be able to specify what criteria a Join should look at.

I'm using ArcMap 10.2+.

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  • What you're looking for is a 'fuzzy join', and I don't know of a way to do that via tabular data. There's only one case I can think of off hand that allows you to set a percentage of possible match - geocoding and address locators. I would approach this one of two ways. Clean up the tabular data so you have consistent formatting between the two sources. Alternatively, geocode your Excel data to its own point feature class and then spatially join the two point layers, which allows a search radius for matches.
    – Chris W
    Nov 17, 2014 at 19:15

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I do not think you can do that in ArcGIS OTB functionality. It requires perfect matches. It is sort of like the COMPGED function and as far as I know it is not built into Arc. Maybe if you do the join in another software that supports this function (SAS?)(http://www.lexjansen.com/nesug/nesug11/ps/ps07.pdf) then you will have more success.

Check out this link. Maybe someone can improve on this with an ArcPy solution. You may be able to use Python with the find, index, and in operators.

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  • LIKE is available in ArcGIS - see the operator list near the bottom of SQL reference for query expressions used in ArcGIS. But you're right in that it wouldn't help this case since a Join requires an exact match. Even the LIKE operator is looking for an exact match of a portion of the value.
    – Chris W
    Nov 17, 2014 at 19:09
  • Does it support Wildcards like it does in other DB products? If so then this may be an approach. Nov 17, 2014 at 19:47
  • Wildcard support is based on the underlying db structure - they're different for Personal vs File vs SDE, etc. That COMPGED function looks really interesting, but that definitely gets out of Arc's limited SQL support. As with most complicated SQL things, going to a full-blown RDBMS as you suggest is the more direct solution.
    – Chris W
    Nov 17, 2014 at 20:14

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