Combining multiple text strings into one cell

headroom

New Member
Joined
Oct 2, 2014
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2
I'm a newbie - please be gentle!

I'm building an "activity log" in Excel - to make activity entry simple and standardized, I've assigned a numerical code number (1-16) to each activity description. The user would then enter all of the number codes for what they did that day into one cell and then the cell next to it would auto-populate with all of the corresponding descriptions.

For example:

Column 1 are dates; column 2 is where the user enters multiple number codes for each day; column 3 would then auto-populate with multiple text descriptions based on the users' codes, column 4 allows user to enter amount of time spent [irrelevant to this question]; columns 5 and 6 are numbered activity descriptions (with column 6 being the source of the auto-populate text descriptions).

I'm having a hard time coming up with a formula that is able to return multiple text strings into the same cell - all of the IF variations I've tried only return one value/description.

Thanks for any help you can provide!
 

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Is custom VBA an option? Otherwise your formula will end up looking like:

Code:
=IFERROR(IF(FIND(1,B1),VLOOKUP(1,$E$1:$F$16,2,0),""),"") & CHAR(10) &  IFERROR(IF(FIND(2,B1),VLOOKUP(2,$E$1:$F$16,2,0),""),"") & CHAR(10) & IFERROR(IF(FIND(3,B1),VLOOKUP(3,$E$1:$F$16,2,0),""),"")

etc. etc. And I already see issues since 1 is found in 16...
 
Upvote 0
Thanks, NRS! Not up to speed with VBA, so I'll try your code. To solve the number duplication issue, would it work to switch to letters? For example: =IFERROR(IF(FIND(a,B1),VLOOKUP(a,$E$1:$F$16,2,0),""),"")
 
Upvote 0

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