Comments on: Excel help.

Question: Excel help.

brent — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 13:12:18 -0800

Excel question: I'm looking to pull a months and years worth of spreadsheet information to a summary report. The days work is saved as reportxxxxxx (month/day/year)

Rather than opening all files, I would like excel to look up the information on the summary and extract a time or comment column from the day's reportxxxxxx. All reports are stored in a common folder but some are missing. At some points during the past two years, new information has been added and some deleted, making a specific cell lookup pulling incorrect information. Suggestions welcome.

By: SirStan

SirStan — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 13:17:02 -0800

Get an intern to normalize the data into a database, and stop storing important business logic in Excel.

By: milkrate

milkrate — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 13:25:27 -0800

If there's a particular label for the row you want - like "total" or "time" - then you can use match-index to do this.

By: chota

chota — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 19:15:03 -0800

for stuff like this, i use VBScript with the Excel Automation functions/object (built-in to Windows/Office).

But SirStan has it right; DATABASE DATABASE DATABASE!

By: Carbolic

Carbolic — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 09:11:32 -0800

If you have Access it makes it pretty easy to convert Excel into a database. Oh, and quit putting that kind of stuff in a spreadsheet!!!! (Forgive me, huge pet peeve)