I agree with what JP has related, but would add that you also include a
"Description" column. With this, you could use the Autofilter to find items
having the same word within their descriptions.........like all "brackets",
or all "elbows", etc...this would help in locating the part you want. The
results will be well worth the effort to get this all into a database.

Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3



"JP" wrote:

Unfortunately if all you have are notebooks, you will have to assign
someone the manual work of typing in the part numbers.

What you could do is put the part number in column A, and the
corresponding tube location/name in column B, you could use a VLOOKUP
formula to assist you.

For example, enter the part number in C1, and in D1 put
=VLOOKUP(C1,A:B,2,FALSE) to return the corresponding tube name for the
part number you entered in C1.

Without having an example or any more information about your problem,
this is all the assistance I can provide at this time.


HTH,
JP

On Jan 15, 9:53 am, Tricia LeAnn <Tricia
wrote:
I work at a place where we have tubes that hold old engineering drawings.
Anytime we need to retrieve one of the old drawings, we have to search
through notebooks looking for particular part numbers in order to find the
drawing we are looking for.

I thought if I could make a list of all the drawing numbers and all the
tubes, it would be a lot easier to be able to type them in Excel and find the
tube number instead of having to flip through 3 huge binders.

The only problem is, I have NO IDEA how to do this! If anyone could help me
I would greatly appreciate it!!

Best wishes- Tricia LeAnn