Formula to append a character to the end of the result if result already exists above?

Hi,

I think I've laid out very clearly in the attachment what kind of formula I'm trying to accomplish, but just for good order - when linking to a value on another sheet, I want to append a character to the end of the resulted value if that value already exists in any of the rows above. The kind of tricky part is it has to look at information in TWO different columns to determine if it's a duplicate.

Please take a look at the attachment and let me know if any questions.

Thanks!!

Originally Posted by AlKey

Enter this formula in K2 then copy down and pull it to the right.

=IF(AND(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("-",A2)),IF(ISNUMBER(A2),"",COUNTIF(A$2:A2,A2))=2),A2&"(b)",A2)

Hi AlKey, thanks for your prompt reply. I notice though that your formula doesn't make any reference to cell B2 anywhere. The appending of the "(b)" should be dependent on the values in both A2 and B2 being duplicated in rows above. I did try it anyway just to be sure, and I've confirmed that we still need to consider B2 somewhere in the formula...

Many thanks.

Sorry, in case it's not clear in my example, the reason column B data needs to be considered is because there will be cases where two values in column A will be the same but column B for those 2 given rows may actually have different data, in which case we don't want the (b) appended.