Ok - I hope I world this correctly.
I have two coumns. Column A is blank, and Column B has different item
descriptions. Instead of manually looking through column B to
determine what to type in A, can i have a formula do that?
EXAMPLE - lets use State Abbreviations -

Column B1 says - ILLINOIS DEPT OF;PAYMENT INITIATED - REVENUE ID =
3423455
another column (B2) says - DEPT OF REVENUE ; MO DOR - PAYMENT ACCEPTED
-
and so on and so on....


The purpose of Column A is to identify column B in two state letters

Every Illinois description will say " ILLINOIS DEPT OF" in column B. So
every column that says that, i want column A to say "IL"

Every Missouri description will say "MO DOR"in column B. So every
column that says that, i want column A to say "MO"

Make sense? I hope so -
basically - search for a string of text, if you find THAT STRING put
"this" in Column A, otherwise search for another string of text, if you
find THAT STRING put "that" in Column A, and so on....

sorry for being so confusing. Basically, i don't want to have to go
through 1000 descriptions every month to identify a State.


mj