Need a complicated IF formula (maybe?)

Hey everyone,

First post here to the forums. I'm doing data entry for a fisheries monitoring project and I'm trying to get Excel to automatically assign a value to column B, based on my entry in column A. I have a separate spreadsheet showing a list of fish species and their assigned tolerance level to environmental degradation (e.g., tolerant, intolerant, or none).

How do I get my data entry spreadsheet to automatically assign the correct tolerance level in column B to the species I enter in column A? I've attempted some fairly complicated IF formulas, but can't seem to make that work. Any help you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks!

L

You should be able to use VLOOKUP here, using your existing table, for example assume you have that table in sheet2 with species in C2:C10 and the toerance level for each in D2:D10.....then in your other sheet, with a specific species in A2 use this formula in B2

=VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet2!C$2:D$10,2,0)