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Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: mister J on April 13, 2010, 02:58:24 am

Title: Microsoft Excel Question
Post by: mister J on April 13, 2010, 02:58:24 am
If this is posted in the wrong forum, accept my apologies and move this to the appropriate forum.

So basically I have a question about two lists of people in excel. All entries are Text fields.

file 1.xls has a list of names, file 2.xls has a list of names divided into categories.

Now all I have to do is crosscheck if the name in the first list exists in the second list, and if so, tally what category they exist.

Example:


List 1
Joe B.
Sam C.
Jenny J.

List 2
Mark F. (rich)
Sam C. (poor)
Jenny J. (rich)

so the tally would go:
poor - 1
rich - 1
not counted - 1

I was wondering if there was a way to streamline the process. Instead of counting hundreds of names manually.
Title: Re: Microsoft Excel Question
Post by: Klaustrophobia on April 13, 2010, 11:38:34 pm
i'm not sure excel can search for strings.  but you could write a very simple program to read the data out of text files and do the tally.
Title: Re: Microsoft Excel Question
Post by: headdie on April 14, 2010, 03:00:52 am
you could do it with vlookups searching each catagory nested in if statments to get the proor/rich for the list of names then probably use something like countif to tally them up
Title: Re: Microsoft Excel Question
Post by: mister J on April 15, 2010, 02:00:44 pm
ah, thanks! that was pretty much it.