My data is arranged by department and under that there is a list of dates in
column a and the dates relate to the data in column b, the problem is that
all of these departments information is on one spreadsheet and if no data was
reported then that date doesn't appear on the spreadsheet. This means that
my function looks for the department and then compares the dates to a summary
spreadsheet and if no data was reported it keeps looking until it find the
date (like it looks into another department down the list) how can I tell the
function to stop looking when it runs into the word "department" again?

example:

Department Shoes
date data
date data
date data

Department Mens
date data
date data
date data

Department Womens
date data
date data
date data
date data

in the example above each word is in its own cell and the two columns are
right next to each other.

Any help would be much appreciated!