Questions about Tagging and Merge Worksheets

[chaoscreater]

Hi, I'm new to using this addon for Excel and would like some help with some of its features please.

Here's a sample data:

Sheet 1:

Person_ID	Company
1	A
2	A
3	A

Sheet 2:

ID	Company	Name
1	B	Joe
2	B	Bob
4	B	Mary

Now, what I would like to do is to join these 2 worksheets together on the matching primary key columns, which is "Person_ID" and "ID". The problem is, it doesn't seem like Easy-XL allow this as the columns are named differently. So to fix this, I had to name ID in Sheet 2 to "Person_ID" so that it's the same name as Sheet 1.

This seemed counter-productive to me because a JOIN is quite a trivial feature and any database software should allow that easily. Assuming that if I have multiple workbooks with multiple sheets to work with, each of them with different column headers but with the same underlying data, then I would have to rename those column headers to match and that would be inefficient isn't it? BTW, most of these data are given to me by my clients so that's why they are inconsistent.

Anyway, now I want to combine the worksheets, but there's a catch. If there are matching IDs found, then we want to keep the data of the matching column(s) from Sheet 1 and add any new data from Sheet 2.


Here's how the result should look:

ID	Company	Name
1	A	Joe
2	A	Bob
3	A
4	B	Mary

As you can see, the company that Joe works at is still company A, the same applies to Bob. This is because we disregard the data from Sheet 2, and kept both the ID column and Company column the same from Sheet 1. However, we added new data from Sheet 2 that aren't found in Sheet 1, that's why we have the Name column as well.

How do I achieve this?



My 2nd question is about the Tagging feature. If I use the "Tag rows by match" feature, then it would lag immensely and always takes at least 5 minutes (or more) to complete. My PC is quite high-end so this shouldn't happen in the first place, not to mention my dataset is small (only 3 columns and around 100 rows of data). I don't understand how the Merge Worksheet feature works well without lag, yet the Tag feature does. It's almost the same thing, except one does tagging and the other does merging.


Lastly, I quite like Easy-XL but I've also used competitor products before such as ASAP Utilities or other Ablebits products. Easy-XL is the most expensive out of them and I was wondering why is the price so steep, can you justify that price point please?

[chaoscreater]

I think I've found a solution to my first question, this tool offers exactly what I'm looking for:
Merge Excel worksheets by matching data in munutes

"You can update only empty cells in your Master table. Check this option if you don't want to overwrite existing values in your main table."

Does Easy-XL support this? Because really all I wanted to do is to keep the data in Sheet 1 but add new data from Sheet 2 that is not found in Sheet 1.

[Easy-XL Support]

Unfortunately, the software can only bring in new columns, as you have discovered.

For tagging, is it possible that you clicked the column letter and highlighted the whole column? In an xlsx, this could select a million cells and so each item you're matching would have to be compared to a million items. If this is the case then simply highlight the 100 or so items manually.

For many users, there are features in Easy-XL that save them many hours of work on a regular basis. For some, the software can pay for itself in as little as one use.

[chaoscreater]

Well, I think Easy-XL should implement this feature because it's quite trivial, as there are often times where you don't want to overwrite existing values.

As mentioned, my dataset consists of only a few rows, NOT millions of data. I know tagging manually works, as I've already pointed out myself. What I want to use the auto-tagging for is quite obvious, to tag rows based on conditions or criterias. It works, but it's slow and when you increase the rows of data to e.g. 20~30, it lags heaps. If my dataset consists of millions of rows, then I can't really complain. But if it lags when it only processed at most 30 rows? Then something is wrong with the performance.

To be fair, there're other Excel tools that offer similar features to this and literally have 200+ features, at half the price of Easy-Xl. I like the tool, but I don't think the price is justified. I would've bought it if it was cheaper, considering many of its features aren't really special/unique as other tools out there does roughly the same, if not better.

[Easy-XL Support]

The performance you describe doesn't sound right. Would it be possible for you to email the workbook to support at easy-xl dot com and include a description of what operations you performed in order to generate the excessive lag?

[killlereye]

If I use the "Tag rows by match" feature, then it would lag immensely and always takes at least 5 minutes (or more) to complete. My PC is quite high-end so this shouldn't happen in the first place, not to mention my dataset is small (only 3 columns and around 100 rows of data). I don't understand how the Merge Worksheet feature works well without lag, yet the Tag feature does. It's almost the same thing, except one does tagging and the other does merging.??

__________
GuL

[Easy-XL Support]

It sounds like an entire column (1 million cells) in being selected. This happens if you click on a column's letter. The "Tag rows by match" command will go through each row in the input worksheet and search for any items in the match list range you selected. If the match list contains a million cells then the process will seem to take forever, even if the match list contains mostly blank cells. Try selecting only the items you'd like to match when you mark the range.