Using Excel as a supplier database that you can search

Not what you want to hear, probably, but you'd be better off building an Access database for this.

There are many, many templates in Access: I would start with a simple inventory template and gradually adapt it to what you want. There are lots of online tutorials. Many years ago, I managed to build a fairly complex database using just the Help file and tutorials, but that was with a much older version of Access. When building a database, you need to think about the data you want to capture and construct your tables for that. Then you create queries to interrogate the data (you can build handy user forms for this) and ultimately reports based on those queries as your output.

A simple small database of suppliers could easily be done in Excel, just use more columns to categorize.
Various search functions can easily be done also. Post a workbook with some mock up sample data so that we have something to work with.


With that being said, I must say that AliGW's suggestion was inspiring. I think about something like that every now and then but reject the idea since it means I have to do some learning. It never occurred to me that there are templates available for Access.