Referencing cells to complete a report

Posted by Bob on December 12, 2001 10:24 AM

I enter a lot of information about our products, and I am a lousy typist. Is there a way for me to set up my cells so that when I enter an item # in C2 the entire description of that item appears in E2? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by Aladin Akyurek on December 12, 2001 10:39 AM

Bob --

Have a look at VLOOKUP. There are plenty examples of how to use VLOOKUP at this site.

Aladin

Posted by Jacob on December 12, 2001 10:43 AM

This Should Help

To start you would need to have all of the items listed and all of the complete descriptions listed somewhere. For example in column AA1:AA100 has the name and BB1:BB100 has the description.

Then in E2 put this =vlookup(C2,$AA$1:$BB$100,2,false)

Then fill this down for as many rows as you want.

Hope this helps

Jacob

Posted by Joe Was on December 12, 2001 10:48 AM

On the far right of your sheet in CA1 down add your CODE, in CB1 add the full description text. Then on your report sheet in C1 put your code and in D1 put =Vlookup(C1,CA:CB,2,False)

Then when you copy the formula down and add a code to C1, your description will popup in D1. JSW

Posted by Jacob on December 12, 2001 10:50 AM

Using vlookup on the entire column i.e. (CA:CB) could take a while for the computer to continually calculate every field whenever data is changed, especially if there is no match, it would have to seach thousands of rows.