Otto, all good questions thank you for your response.

Entries in Column A start in row 2
Yes Entries in Columns B:F are in the same rows as entries in Column A
Entries in Columns G:K start in row 2
Yes entries in G:K are not necessarily related to entries in B:F of the same
row

Yes, I would like Excel to loop through all the entries in B:F to find a
match in the G:K Columns
If a match is found- I want the entry in column A to get pasted into Column
L in its corresponding row. Yes there can be more than one match.

If it would help I would like to send a small piece of a spreadsheet for you
to take a look? .

I put in the suggestion from Max below but was returned an N/A#.

"Otto Moehrbach" wrote:

JB
If I understand what you want, a formula is not going to do it. You
will need VBA. Let me rephrase what you said but in generic language.
You have entries in Column A. Starting in what row?
You have entries in Columns B:F in the same rows as the entries in Column A.
You have entries in Columns G:K. Starting in what row?
The entries in G:K are not necessarily related to the entries in B:F in the
same rows.
You want Excel to loop through all the rows of the entries in B:F.
For EACH row of B:F, you want Excel to loop through ALL the entries in G:K
for a match in ALL 5 columns of B:F and G:K
If a match is found, you want the entry in Column A copied to Column L. In
what row?
Is this right?
Can there be more than one match? If so, where do you want the Column A
entry copied?
HTH Otto
"JB Akron" wrote in message
...
I need to create a formula or function that evaluates criteria from 5 (B-F)
columns and matches it to another 5 (G-K) columns. If all the columns are
equal (combination of text and numbers) then a site identifier in Column A
needs to be copied and pasted to another column (L).

Here is where it gets fun- Each site identifier in Column A (e.g. S1, S2,
S3 etc) which is described by Columns B-F can relate to many individual
records in Column G-K. In other words there are many more records in
columns
G-K about 5 times more. So the formula will have to look through a range
of
information in B-F to find a match.

Essentially the B-F data represents a site location- "Watershed Basin
Code",
"Stream Code", "River Name", "River Mile" and "Year". These same column
headings are in G-K but relate to separate species information. Thus you
can
have 20 species at one site- so the formula would potentially to recognize
that there are 20 S1's and maybe only 5 S2's etc. There are instances
where
certain sites do not have bio data and vice versa.

I imagine it will have to be a long complicated formula in which I am
stumbling to find a foundation.

Thank you for your time and consideration

JB