Dear friends

I'm a Chinese language student who's new to this forum, so very nice to meet you! I am trying to make a multipurpose Excel program for me and my fellow students to test and consolidate our Chinese (no easy task!). My Excel knowledge is limited, and in particular, I'm not good with table manipulations.

Something that various parts of my nascent program are trying to do is interrogate a big data set of several thousand entries (my vocab entries, ordered in columns by 'topic', 'chinese', 'pronunciation', english' etc.) As the nature of Chinese is that many entries contain some of the same Chinese characters, I want to find a way to enter a character in a cell on a separate sheet, and dynamically list all the entries from my vocab list which contain that character. At the moment, the only way I can do this is by inserting another column in my list containing something like (L3)=L2+COUNTIF(K3,"*"&$M$1&"*"), such that for every new instance of an entry that meets the criteria, the value in the column at that point increases by one. I then use INDEX(MATCH(1,2,3,4,5,6 etc.)) on that column with the relevant data column I want to extract. This seems very inelegant, and is very processor intensive given the size of my data set. I would have though you could use some function involving SMALL (or something else I don't know) to do this much more efficiently. Would anyone kindly be able to help?

Many thanks!

Graham