Forum Discussion
Combining like items
Depending on the nature of the data and volume I'd consider....
i) if you've got every possible combination already, and it's not too onerous a task, you could create a reference table of cleansed values to join to get your cleansed version.
| Item Number | Item Description | New Description |
| 12345 | Potato Peeler | Potato Peeler |
| 12345 | Potatoe Peeler | Potato Peeler |
| 54321 | Potato Peeler 6 pk | Potato Peeler |
ii) if it is a huge list of items or you'll be ingesting new records that could include new values, you might want to try and do some string comparison but this isn't without risk as would never be perfect. Have a look at things like Levenshtein Distance on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_metric and see if something like that would work. This is a good example https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Levenshtein-String-Distance-Algorithm-In-DAX/m-p/959545.
iii) Failing that you need some data quality management upstream 🙂
Good luck!