I get a weekly report that lists the names of contracts in one column and
their current status in another column. I need to be able to quickly report
on the change in status of each contract from week to week. New ones will be
added each week, and closed contracts may disappear. How can I do this? I
am not a new user, but I don't speak Excel very well. Can someone help me
with plain talk for my simple mind?

Vicki,
Basically you must be able to identify each of the contracts uniquely in
both lists, either by a single piece of information about them such as a
unique contract ID number or name or by a group of several items that taken
as a group are unique to that entry on the sheets.

The process can be somewhat time consuming depending on the length of your
lists - without taking advantage of any special circumstance that may exist
in your lists (such as them being sorted by some column) you basically have
to take each item in one list and compare it to every item in the other list
and when a match is found on the unique data item/data group then you check
to see if status has changed and update accordingly. If you go through the
complete "other" list without finding a match, you assume the entry being
tested is a new one and place it into the 'other' list.

To fully synchronize things, you may have to then go through the "other"
list and see if any in it are missing in the weekly update list and take
action accordingly (no change presumed, or maybe presumed closed and may want
to delete in your running status list).

This pretty much has to be done with VBA code; i.e. a macro.

Because this kind of thing is often very dependent upon the worksheet
layouts, it's usually a little difficult to provide specific code solution
here in the forum. If you'd like to discuss it more, you are welcome to
contact me at (remove spaces) HelpFrom @ jlatham site.com - I've also found
that it is best if I get involved in helping provide a solution that I get
some actual example(s) of the worksheets/workbooks involved, this could be a
point of concern if the information is considered confidential by your or the
data's owner.

"Vicki Needs Help" wrote:

I get a weekly report that lists the names of contracts in one column and
their current status in another column. I need to be able to quickly report
on the change in status of each contract from week to week. New ones will be
added each week, and closed contracts may disappear. How can I do this? I
am not a new user, but I don't speak Excel very well. Can someone help me
with plain talk for my simple mind?