Hi Portlock,
Did you solve this? I was fascinated by your challenge and have come up with another way to do it. It is a two step process but dead easy (has to be - my Excel skills are weak). Will post only if not solved by other posters advice.
If am not, by any means, an excel expert but use it a fair bit. Sounds like you have two operations you want to do; identify name variations and return some associated data to a new column. Ideally I would use the 'like' function in a logical statement. Something like =IF(A1 like...