Thanks Brian, On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Brian Barker <b.m.bar...@btinternet.com>wrote:
> At 18:32 31/07/2013 -0400, Don Parris wrote: > >> <SNIP> > All this doesn't help much until we know exactly what you need to extract > from all this. > > I hope it became more clear further down that I really just need the entity names. <SNIP> > If I have the ID in ColA and the Name in ColB (from my DB), I want to put >> the description list (from the banks) in ColE and be able to match payee >> names and have the ID copied to ColD. Even if I have to create a separate >> column for each bank's description style, that's still gotta be better than >> trying to manually match up transaction data from my bank to what I have in >> my DB. >> >> I thought about VLOOKUP, but that seems to not work at all when I try it >> using text fields. >> > > > > What do you have in column E - the entire record from the bank, not just > the "entity name" you want to search for? In that case, the first thing > you probably have to do is to strip out just the entity name into a > separate column: let's say column F. How you do that depends on the > precise possibilities in the bank data. The next problem is that VLOOKUP() > can retrieve values only from the right of matched cells, whereas your > "entity ID" is currently to the left of the entity name. Since you haven't > mentioned column C, I'm going to take that over for this purpose. In C1 > enter =A1 and fill this down the list of entities: you now have a copy of > the ID list to the right of the names - where they need to be. > > Now in D1 enter > =VLOOKUP(F1;B$1:C$10;2;0) > and fill that down column D. > > I trust this helps. > > Yes, I actually set it up that way. Playing with it a bit more, I see I do need to strip out the entity names from the description. Is it possible to do that in Calc? My function: =VLOOKUP(F2,$A$2:$B$187,2,0) I see now that, if I delete the whole description, and keep just the entity name, I get the results I want. Again, I just need to figure out how to extract that bit from the bank's description. Any thoughts on that? Regards, Don -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted