Excel 2007 : VBA? non VBA? ways to extract data

[snowman1206]

Hi guys,

I have a very large data set, and one of the columns are the names of organizations involved in a project. There are overlaps in the names of the organizations (organization A might appear in row 10 and row 1000 or more etc), and I have to come up with a way of assigning each of them a code. I dont have the full list of organizations, so I dont think i can do a vlookup with this.. Is there a way i can get a list of all the names of the organizations, without repeats?

I am thinking that this might be better handled in access? through Macros? but again I am not familiar with those, so I would really appreciate if you guys can point me somewhere!

Thanks!

[TMS]

Use an Advanced Filter to extract a list of unique entries.

Sort that into whatever order you want ... alphabetic maybe ... and assign your ID

Then use VLOOKUP against that new list to assign the ID to the original list.

See http://www.excelforum.com/excel-prog...n-a-range.html for an example.

Regards

[snowman1206]

Oh wow that worked just like that!
You saved my life! i was debating whether i should bore into the VBA stuff....

Thanks a lot!

[TMS]

You're welcome. Thanks for the feedback.