Clean up 2 spreadsheets with dirty data

This task will be fairly straightforward for someone with Microsoft Excel skills and an eye for detail. I expect it will take no more than an hour or two. It would be helpful if it could be completed by Fri 5th Apr.

The task involves 2 Excel spreadsheets containing a number of columns, 3 of which are of interest, as follows:

Product
Distributor
Manufacturer

The other columns contain various financial information (I will need to remove this before sending due to confidentiality) and the spreadsheets contain around 9,000 rows in total.

There are around 900 products in total, and each product, distributor and manufacturer appears multiple times in the data. The problem is that due to the fact no data validation had been put in place, each product, distributor and manufacturer may have a number of different spellings or abbreviations. For example:

AB Johnson
AB Johsnon
ABJohnson
AB Johnson Ltd.

The task is to rename all the different spellings and abbreviations so that every time a certain Product, Distributor or Manufacturer appears, it is always spelled in exactly the same way. This should be done without deleting, adding or changing the order of any of the rows in the spreadsheet.

You might need to contact me for clarification for example if you are unsure whether some of the different spellings are the same supplier or a different one with a similar name. (For example you might need to check whether "K. Ford" and "Ford Media" are the same company or a different one).

The task could be made easer by exporting the data to Microsoft Access, perform cleanup, and then dropping the clean data back into the original sheet.