I have a vendor database with over 1,000 unique vendors and am looking for a way to quality control new entries to avoid duplicates in a VENDOR NAME column (note that there is a separate VENDOR ID # column).
One way of doing this seems to be through formatting the VENDOR NAME column as a dropdown while NOT restricting to list values only. When someone goes to add a new vendor, if that vendor name was already entered previously, it will populate in the dropdown and thus alert the data entrant that the vendor already exists in the database. The drawbacks are that when genuine new vendors are added they do not automatically get added to the dropdown list for future reference, which means the dropdown data would need to be manually updated on a regular basis. And, the dropdown will only show entries when the spelling is identical starting from the beginning of the text string. For example, if a vendor named "ABC Happy Man LLC" was in the sheet and someone entered "Happy Man LLC" then the dropdown would not show the previous entry since the text string starts with "ABC".
Is there another approach to quality control our VENDOR NAME column to ensure that duplicate information is not being entered?
