I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect that the answer might be the use of Contr0l+H (or Find & Replace). You can quickly replace every instance of @abc.com with @xyz.com. There will be options around whether the “find” represents the entire cell contents or not. You can perform this whole Find & Replace operation based on a selection of a column or some cells or on no selection at all (that last one would mean the entire table) – you can even do this across multiple sheets in one Excel file.

Also, with text-to-columns, one option for creating columns from text is around setting a fixed width. I never use that. I always do it based on a separator – a comma or a semi-colon. You can do more than one pass. One of those passes could be based on the @ symbol. — But, maybe you don’t even need to worry about that – maybe the find & replace thing is all you need.

– Dennis

Typically you get #REF! when you are “looking up” a column that is outside of the table array.

Imagine that I enter
=vlookup(a2,g1:i11,3,0)

In the example, I have columns g-i. That’s 3 columns for my table array. If I had entered a 4 instead of 3 (as the 3rd parameter), Excel would return a value of #REF!

Check that – is that the problem you’re facing?

– Denns

Wonderful information you are providing here. My question is somewhat related in that it involves merging data. I have a list of people and their emails. The company has changed names so the email’s domain changed too. Example john@abc.com is now john@xyz.com. It’s a challenge to do a text to columns because names are of differing lengths. And even if this was possible, how would I incorporate the new domain into the column?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Roy

The Vlookup function works great if I use the 1 (1 would be the column where the match is found) as the value from the cell it found. But if I use a 2 instead of 1, I get “#REF!” as a result instead of the numbers in the 1st column to the right of the matched column. I tried to useExcel help but it just added more fog factor.

Any suggestions?

I’m glad you found this post useful. What you propose is fairly straightforward. And, yes, VLOOKUP can be used to merge all the info into one. The main reason that you will be able to do so is because of the duplicated (triplicated?) ID columns – one in each sheet.

The trickiest question you have is how and where to merge the information to. Personally, I would create a new sheet. I’d call it summary. It would contain the summarized info from the 3 other sheets thanks to VLOOKUP.

Here’s a picture of how I organized my “summary” sheet.

Next, I’d take the ID column from sheet 1 and copy it into column A in the “summary” sheet. After all, sheet 1 is the “main” worksheet. This ID column can be used as the basis for all VLOOKUPS to come.

To get the VLOOKUP to work from one sheet to another, you’ll type out the formula, and when you get to the 2nd parameter (the table array), just select the section in the other sheet with your mouse.

The biggest headache, will be cleaning things up. You’ll end up with a bunch of values of zero. These result from doing a VLOOKUP on something that is blank. The VLOOKUP may have worked & found a match, it’s just that what it’s bringing back to you is an empty cell and that’s getting translated to a zero value.

I would probably go through sheets 1-3 before starting any vlookup, and finding empty cells (this can be done using the pull down menu data -> filter -> aut0-filter). Once they are found, you can substitute empty cells with a value like “BLANK”. This would be a lot easier to clean up than dealing with empty cells.

I hope you find this useful & not overwhelming. Happy merging!

This how to is great. I am starting to understand the VLOOKUP function but I hope you can help me out with a more complicated way of using it (I think).

I have 3 different workbooks. Lets keep using names for this example. Workbook 1 has ID, Names and Phone Numbers. The second workbook has ID, Names, Age, Department. The 3rd workbook has ID, Names, Email, Home Address, and Emergency Contact. Workbook 1 is the main workbook as workbook 2 or 3 may be missing some employees (or not, but this makes it impossible to simply sort each workbook and copy/paste the information to the first/main spreadsheet). Can VLOOKUP be used to merge all this information into one? If so, how and if not I hope you know of a way. Thanks for any response.

Thanks for responding. Yes, I do make a lot of copies and what I actually want is…getting the job done without making too many copies :)
I am indebted to two actions I take a lot while analysing data in Excel: copy-paste and filtering.

Have a good day!

I don’t have a lot of advice, but let me say this:

– personally, I love making copies of things. I would keep the datasets you have, and make “working” copies of each. I’d delete unnecessary columns from each dataset, so that the end result contained only the columns I wanted.

– if you have two datasets that are being merged, be deliberate about which dataset is appended to which dataset. Should you start merging using the dataset with more records? Or the one with more columns? Will the end result contain “everything” it can even if there are a lot of blank values?

– I would probably spend time making sure each dataset is as “clean” and consistent with itself before merging it to another dataset.

– I also love keeping a “log” of what I’m doing & why in a separate text file (like NotePad).

– If you’re good about keeping copies at various stages and good about taking notes, you are more free to make mistakes. If you do, take a deep breathe, try to figure out what happened, accept it, and start over.

Best of luck!