Excel Special Sign Removal

Hi there!

I got three columns in excel. Column A is a list of items, so is column C. Column B displays the similarity in the 2 lists.

I use the following command =IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A1,$C$1:$C$265,0)),"",A1).

SO:
A B C

Cat Fish
Dog Dog Roll
Bull Carpet
Apple Dog

But what I want to do is the following:

If I have "D-og 12 2-3" in column A and say "do g 1 22/3" in column C, I want it to be displayed in column B. To do that I need to decapitalise and remove all the special symbols such as space, ), (, *, &, ^, %, $, #, @,! etc.

So I get dog1223 in column B since they are the same.

Is there a way to do that?

Yours Kindly,
Don Defy