Excel Video 153 might be EXACTly what you need to make your life easier. EXACT is a simple Excel function that compares two text strings (say the text in two different cells) to see if they’re exactly the same. Today’s trick is to combine EXACT with CONCATENATE from the last Excel Video. If you concatenate several columns together and sort the data, you can quickly compare whether one multi-column list is exactly the same as another multi-column list.
When would you use something like that? If you have a list of patients in your practice with a date of service and a procedure code, you could combine that information into one cell with CONCATENATE and then combine a similar list of treated patients from a hospital or a billing company to make sure that every patient that was treated was billed.
If you have a way to use this trick, please post your suggestions either to the MGMA Excel Users Community or as a comment to my blog. I’d love to hear from you.
