Glad to be of some help - thanks for the info on the J. Walkenbach link


Rgds
sysAccountant

"ivanoddcat" wrote:

Thanks for that SysAccountant. have managed to solve my problem with this.
by the way the link to the example is :

http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/usertips/tip073.htm

"SysAccountant" wrote:

The solution to this problem requires familiarity with two techniques in
Excel :
* Conditional formatting
and
* countif formula (Countif)

For a very clear explanation and a dead easy example go to the John
Walkenbach website : (http://www.j-walk.com/) and look for the article :
"Comparing Two List With Conditional Formatting" and the "Excel User Tip"
section.

I had a similiar sort of issue where I wanted to do the comparision
proogramatically - to incorporate the above technique programmatically , just
simply use the macro recorder and follow the steps as stated in the John
Walkenbach article (tailor it to your situation ,of course).

Hope my suggestion helps.

Regards

sysAccountant

"ivanoddcat" wrote:

hello
i am trying to compare the contents of all the cells in column a with all
the cells in column b and where there is a match copy that name to column c.
the problem is the name in , for example, A10 may exist in B1620 and i have
16000 cells to compare. hope i've explained this ok.
I have spent a good few hours searching through the theads here and found a
lot of very useful stuff but not in answer to this specific proble.
can anybody help please.