does it have to be in perl? you could use excel's vlookup function (note you'll need to sort the general data, and pay attention to the "fuzzy match" flag)

anyways, to do it in perl, first check out the Index of Spreadsheet FAQs node. then the general approach will be to read the general data in and probably create a hash with the strings as keys. Then you can read the search strings column, and check if each row exists in the general data hash.