Thread: Arranging and copying data between two files/sheets

Hello forumgoers. I'm a newly registered member, and also a very basic Excel user with no knowledge of macros or formulas or VBA, whatever that is. I've just started my headfirst dive into the vast amount of training and tutorial material provided here, which is wonderful, because I can see how much easier my current job would be if I could master this powerful program.

But, since I've got a specific problem that needs solving, I figured I'd post it here in the hopes of some glowing geeky internet angel coming along and giving me absolutely anything to work with, because I have no idea what I need to do or learn to achieve this.


Here's the situation: I've got two Excel files, with one datasheet in each about the same list of products. Both sheets have as their first column a list of catalog numbers, but have different information in the columns following. The order of the rows of catalog numbers (and their respective products/info) is different on the two sheets. My goal is to copy one column of information from the second sheet (specifically the "unit weight" numbers) to a blank column with the same title in the first sheet. But I can't just copy/paste the column over, because the order of the catalog numbers are different in each sheet. Also, the page which I need to copy data into has 658 items, while the page I'm getting the data from has some 850 items, so I need to be able to copy over only the rows I need (the ones whos catalog number cells correspond to those in the first sheet).

There are ~650 products listed in these datasheets, and my boss's default plan is for me to take a catalog number on the first sheet, search for the corresponding row with the same number in the second sheet, and copy the "unit weight" cell data over. All manually, which would take hours, when I know it could take minutes. I'm just not sure what would be viable, aside from a macro to do the manual thing I just described, which I'm currently looking into, but that looks like a long road.

Sorry I couldn't post the worksheets, because I'm not sure how private this information is. But any comments would be appreciated!

Dear smohyee, Good Morning.

With no worksheet to see the lay-out, it´s much more complicated to help you.

I believe that you can use the VLOOKUP FUNCTION on first plan, to obtain the desired data ("unit weight") from the second plan using the catalog number to search.