Finding the earliest date for a player and inserting result into cell

[Steve Saunders]

Hi all,

Am hoping for some pointers for my problem. I have a spreadsheet with players names and the date(s) they attended our indoor football league. What I want to do is to find the earliest date that each player attended a match (from the date attended column) and then automatically insert that date into the cell for the player. I have over 2000 rows of data (this is just a snippet).

I think VLOOKUP is the function I should use, but I'm unsure how to do a "match", and from what I have read it looks like INDEX could be the way to go. I've had a bash about with no luck.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Any assistance gratefully appreciated!

Regards,
Steve

 

[kevin9999]

In future, please provide a sample of your data using the XL2BB - Excel Range to BBCode or alternatively, share your file via DropBox, Google Drive or similar file sharing platform, so helpers don't have to retype your data to provide a solution.

Book1
	A	B
1	Player	Earliest date
2
3	John	14/04/2023
4	Lily	15/04/2023
5	Steve	18/04/2023
6
7
8
9	Player	Date attended
10
11	John	14/04/2023
12	Lily	15/04/2023
13	Lily	16/04/2023
14	Lily	17/04/2023
15	Steve	18/04/2023
16	Steve	19/04/2023
17	Steve	20/04/2023
18	Steve	28/04/2023
19	Steve	30/05/2023
Sheet1

Cell Formulas
Range	Formula
B3:B5	B3	=MINIFS($B$11:$B$19,$A$11:$A$19,A3)