Im a newbie and help with vlookup for a keyword

[hakimi]

Hey I would really appreciate if someone could help with this. I'm trying to use vlookup to items from a master list that have the word "dress". THe formula that I am currently using is VLOOKUP("*"&E5&"*",'Overall Summary'!A5:D1427,2,FALSE)...where E5 is the word dress, "overall summary" is the master list. The problem I keep on encountering is that the formula is grabbing the same item every single time. Is there anyway I can have the formula research the list if it encounters a duplicate? Let me know if this doesn't make any sense. Any help would be great

 

[btomjack]

The problem with VLOOKUP is that it will always pull the first thing it finds that meets your criteria ("*"&E5&"*", in this case). If you want to get different results, you have to give it different input.

To put it another way, it's like you typed the word "dress" into Google, and Google came back with 100,000 search results but they were all the exact same page. VLOOKUP is only interested in the first thing that matches.

 

[bbott]

Hey I would really appreciate if someone could help with this. I'm trying to use vlookup to items from a master list that have the word "dress". THe formula that I am currently using is VLOOKUP("*"&E5&"*",'Overall Summary'!A5:D1427,2,FALSE)...where E5 is the word dress, "overall summary" is the master list. The problem I keep on encountering is that the formula is grabbing the same item every single time. Is there anyway I can have the formula research the list if it encounters a duplicate? Let me know if this doesn't make any sense. Any help would be great

What is your desired result (i.e. what do you want the formula to return)? There may be other ways of finding what you're looking for.

 

[storm925]

If you are needing to know how many cells will contain the word dress in a string, you could use the following formula...

=SUMPRODUCT(--(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(E5,'Overall Summary'!A5:A1427))))

this would give you an idea of the number of duplicates.

 

[hakimi]

What is your desired result (i.e. what do you want the formula to return)? There may be other ways of finding what you're looking for.

Im trying to pull all of the items in my master list that have the word "dress" into a separate sheet.