Your lookup table can be a combination of alpha and numeric data. One thing
you do have to make sure is that the data on your job card has (that you are
using as the first argument of VLookup) has to be the same data type as its
match in your Lookup table (which is in Column A).
I've seen data get imported into Excel that appears to be numeric, but is
actually text ( "5" is text, but appears to be a number). Vlookup will not
match 5 to "5" unless you use some other excel functions (such as TEXT).
Also, leading and trailing spaces could cause the data to not match (look at
excel help for TRIM function).
You will need to key a Vlookup function for each field you want a value
returned. In some cases you may need to concatenate several VLookup
functions (City, State Zip - if this data is in different columns in your
lookup table, but you want it to appear together in one column).
Once you have the first job card set up, maybe you can use it as a template.
Put a button on the sheet and assign a macro like the following to make
copies of the original sheet (you'll need to change the sheet name in the
macro to your own sheet name).
Sub CopySheet()
Sheets("Sheet2").Copy After:=Sheets("Sheet2")
End Sub
"justjohn" wrote:
Thankyou both very much for the advice. I have started to use the
vlookup function and it appears to be at least part of the way forward
for me.
There appears to be two problems still:
The vlookup function requires the input of the the cell "coordinates"
this would be very useable if all of the account numbers in the company
database were; 1, all ONLY numbers, and 2, an unbroken sequence of
numbers.
Also, it seems to require that I write a function each time I produce a
Jobcard, and I need to run several of them.
So, what I really need is a function that will search column A for a
given account number (which could be alpha, numeric, or alpha&numeric),
then insert the contents of some of the cells in the row of the "found"
account number into prescribed cells on a different page. The second
part of this appears to require the "linking" of several lookup
functions.
Please don't think I am feeble and am just scrounging information, I'm
not. I am keen to learn as much as I can about excel, and take the
information that you give me seriously, and am grateful for it too. :)
thankyou both again
regards
John
--
justjohn
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