How to auto populate a line of data

[johnvoe]

As a newbie here apologies for asking what’s probably a basic question but to date I can’t find a solution and hoping someone can help. Briefly I’m transferring ships arrival data from old WW2 books (for our local port) onto a spread sheet with cell headings for Name, Built, Where Built, Length, Grt, Callsign and so on. There is a lot of regular traffic each month so, where a ship has been before,I want to be able to auto populate a new line with all the data already entered by simply entering the ship’s name? At present I can only auto populate the name cell, then search, highlight the entry I want, copy and paste it into the new line. With 5 years of data to enter this is obviously time consuming and I’d like to speed the whole process up by being able to auto populate the whole (horizontal) line of data by simply typing in the ship’s name (obviously this only applies to the vessels that have an entry, with detail, already).
Hoping this can be done in Excel and that someone on here can point me in the right direction!
Many thanks

 

[smitpau]

Hi,

Something like this could work:

The IF COUNTIF checks if the same value (name/number) in this case 3, is repeated, then the vlookup finds that value in the same column in the rows above.

Any questions please let me know.

Book1
	H	I
20	1	0
21	2	0
22	3	5
23	4	0
24	3	5
Sheet1

Cell Formulas
Range	Formula
I20:I21,I23	I20	=IF(COUNTIF($H$19:H19,H20),1,0)
I24	I24	=IF(COUNTIF($H$19:H23,H24),VLOOKUP(H24,$H$19:I23,2,FALSE))

 

[johnvoe]

Hi, and thank you for replying to my question. At the risk of sounding really stupid about this where exactly would I start with this...? I post below a screen shot of what I’m looking at and maybe you can guide me as to where the code should go. Just to clarify you will see the vessel called Earl of Zetland II appears on the sheet and was obviously a regular caller so the next time I need to make an entry for her I simply want to type in her name and have that whole horizontal line of her (previous) data auto populate the new line (the dates I just amend manually, no probs there)
Thanks again