Is there a SumIf function for text? - to gather different words in one cell

Hello,

I would like to make a kind of a dictionary to help my studies. On the first worksheet I would like to have cells A-word, B-definition, C-name of group of synonyms it belongs to, D-synonyms. On the second sheet I would like to have columns A - name of the group and B - the synonyms. I would like to choose the group name on the first page from a drop down list and I want to have a formula for cell B on Sheet2, which would choose only the relevant cells from Sheet1 column A and show them there. If the SUMIF function worked with text, the formula would have looked like this =SUMIF(Sheet1!C1:C1000, "Animals", Sheet1!A1:A1000). I would be very grateful if anyone could advise me on how to do it with text. I think the formula that works with text is called "concatenate", but I can't figure out a way to use it for this purpose.

There is a way to do it without macros.

1. Sort your input tab by group
2. use the MATCH(groupname,seekrange,1)
groupname=is the cell of your dropdownlist selection
seekrange sheet2!a:a
3. if there is a match, the cell containing the match function will give the row prior to the desired groupname

Sounds like you're looking for a lookup function from a data validation list if you can setup an example for sheet 1 and upload it i'm sure someone here can help.

Thank you very much for your posts, here is a file with what I need, the first three words belong to one group and the last two to another

Thank you for your reply, I am afraid I am not quite sure how to sort the input tabs by group