View Single Post
  #1   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions
mr tom mr tom is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 119
Default Fun with text functions - search for text

Hi,

Apologies in advance - text functions are not my strong point.

I'm introducing a unique identifier to an old data set.

Previously, total transactions would be tagged with a staff member's ID,
e.g. 123a.

Where staff move about, this occurs for each manager, operating company or
office they have been based in, and therefore this ID with a total next to it
can appear more than once.

I can find these cases easily enough with a sort and formula to bring out
duplicates. There will be few.

My problem is getting the new "tag" I have created against the old
transaction list (ignore the non-unique cases).

The "tag" is a concatenation of their company-office-manager's id-staff id,
and as such I've got a list that runs, e.g.

WM-Bath-jsmith-123a (where jsmith is the manager's id and 123a is the staff
id)
WM-Bath-jsmith-234a
....
....
and later...
WM-Bristol-gbrown-123a (where the staff member moved from Bath to Bristol
and changed manager in the process).

The old list is just the staff ids (with total transactions against them):
123a
234a
345a
456b
....


So, I need a formula which I can put in next to the old list (123a etc)
which looks for the staff id in the list of new unique tags
(wm-bath-jsmith-123a would be a match).

It should only match values after the final hyphen.

As I say, don't worry about the duplicates - there are only a handful and I
can manage them easily enough - my main concern is the few thousand other
cases.

Thanks in advance (and virtual hugs & kisses etc) for any pointers /
solutions.

Cheers,

Tom.