Referencing moving cells?

[pearldrumbum]

I have several worksheets of data that I'd like to compile in a sum. Sounds easy I know...

Each worksheet looks similar to this:

Person A Data 1 Data 2 Data 3....
Person B " " "
.
.
.


On the final sheet I'd like to sum all of Data 1 for person A, Data 2/PersonA etc etc...

But on each sheet the data is sorted differently, and is often re-sorted. The final sheet will also be re-sorted often. But the data is always in the same place RELATIVE to the persons name. Is there a function to find a cell relative to the value thats in a cell (ie, look up the persons name, and reference the cell 2 columns over (to add Data 2, in that example))?

I feel like this could be simple, but I'm not finding any functions that do something like this. Do I need to nest different functions together to do this?

Basically, on the last page for the cell representing Data 2 for Person B (C2 in the above example) to =sum([cell 2 columns to the right of wherever the text "person B" is found]) across all worksheets.

Thanks!

[pearldrumbum]

I was thinking I would end up using VLOOKUP but the values in the specified range have to be ascending order, correct? In this case, they aren't, and rarely will be

[pearldrumbum]

Ok, so it looks like VLOOKUP is doing the trick even though they aren't sorted like they're supposed to be. Maybe this is because each of my values (names) are unique so it always finds an exact match?

Anyway, so now I'm wondering if there is a faster way to sum them than sum((vlookup)+(vlookup)+...)? Each of my sums will have about 30 different vlookups. And I have about 300 seperate pieces of data to do this with. A lot are very similar (just changing the index number), but a short-cut around the tedium would be welcome...