Find Similar Records within same Column

[LJP]

I have a table with about 15500 records and two columns

1st column = ID
2nd column = Company_Name

Sample below:
ID Company_Name
446 76013Amy Cearnal
2632 A & P Food Equipment, Inc - dba Hobart Sales & Service
1843 a la mode, inc.
384 A Partnership, Inc.
972 A To Z Marketing Research, Inc.


3175 A.M. Best Company
3364 A.R. Radford & Associates dba California Recoveries Company
3764 A/P Recovery, Inc.
3999 A-1 Mortgage Company
644 Detroit A-1 Recovery, Inc.
3431 Pittsburgh A-1 Repossessions
2630 A-1 Royal Inc.
2620 Aaron I. Katsman, P.C.
2304 ABBA Associates, Inc.
641 ABC Canada
840 Abelson Legal Search
1426 Aberdeen Group, Inc.
1431 Able Engineering Services
758 ABM Industries Inc
3981 Canada ABN AMRO Bank, N.V.
1004 ABN Amro Bank, N.V., London Branch

What I would like to do is find all the companies that similar names. For example, I would like to have a new table with all the A-1s and ABN Amros. All the other records don't mean much to me. Keep in mind that I'm not looking for a highly efficient and flawless query. If I can manage to cut the 15500 records down to 2000 records, I would consider that to be a major win. Even if I have to go through all 2000 manually to find the 80 records that are truly similar.

Unfortunately I have short amount of time to compare all 15500 records and it's really not possible to go through all 15500 records.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[ConneXionLost]

Hi LJP,

In one word: "Wildcards".

You could apply a filter with wildcards, or better yet, build a select query with wildcards in the criteria with the "Like" operator. Once your query suits your need, you can convert it to a make-table query.

Cheers,