Excel - matching data
 

excel 2003 - office professional.
I have data for water temperature from two reservoirs taken over 5 years. I
want to match the water temperatures from the two reservoirs only for samples
taken on the same day as not all samples were taken at the same time. I
therefore have four columns: 1) date of sample for reservoir 1; 2) nitrate
reservoir 1; 3) date of sample reservoir 2; 4) nitrate reservoir 2.
There are uneven sample numbers for each reservoir where there was some data
missing from one of the reservoirs.
Many thanks

Hi Peter

You can use conditional formatting to identify dates in common between two
columns. Let's assume that your dates are in columns A and C. Select column
A and pull-down:

Format Conditional formatting select {formula is} and enter

=ISERROR(MATCH(A1,$C$1:$C$10,0)) and pick a distictive format. The
distictive cells will be not-matches. You can expand the $C$10 to whatever
you column size is.

--
Gary's Student


"Peter" wrote:

excel 2003 - office professional.
I have data for water temperature from two reservoirs taken over 5 years. I
want to match the water temperatures from the two reservoirs only for samples
taken on the same day as not all samples were taken at the same time. I
therefore have four columns: 1) date of sample for reservoir 1; 2) nitrate
reservoir 1; 3) date of sample reservoir 2; 4) nitrate reservoir 2.
There are uneven sample numbers for each reservoir where there was some data
missing from one of the reservoirs.
Many thanks

Hi Gary"s Student
Thanks for your help, that worked a treat...is there now any quick way of
filtering out the non-matched data - as I have rather a lot of it to go
through? I have stuck an auto-filter on the column with the distinctive cells
in, but can see no obvious way of filtering out the formatted text.
Cheers,
Peter

"Gary''s Student" wrote:

Hi Peter

You can use conditional formatting to identify dates in common between two
columns. Let's assume that your dates are in columns A and C. Select column
A and pull-down:

Format Conditional formatting select {formula is} and enter

=ISERROR(MATCH(A1,$C$1:$C$10,0)) and pick a distictive format. The
distictive cells will be not-matches. You can expand the $C$10 to whatever
you column size is.

--
Gary's Student


"Peter" wrote:

excel 2003 - office professional.
I have data for water temperature from two reservoirs taken over 5 years. I
want to match the water temperatures from the two reservoirs only for samples
taken on the same day as not all samples were taken at the same time. I
therefore have four columns: 1) date of sample for reservoir 1; 2) nitrate
reservoir 1; 3) date of sample reservoir 2; 4) nitrate reservoir 2.
There are uneven sample numbers for each reservoir where there was some data
missing from one of the reservoirs.
Many thanks