Need to compare columns in different worksheets. Help!

[Beffers124]

Help! I have only rudimentary knowledge of excel, but I know there must be a way to do this. I have two worksheets: GRANTS and UPDATES. GRANTS is my total project list. UPDATES lists SOME of projects as GRANTS, but with an additional column that includes a status update. Not every project from GRANTS is on UPDATE. Each worksheet has an ID# column. I would like to compare the ID# column in GRANTS & UPDATES and if they have the same #, have the status from UPDATES put in a new column with the corresponding ID# in GRANTS worksheet. Help!

[FDibbins]

Hi and welcome to the forum

From the sounds of it, you can probably do this with a vlookup(). the syntax is...
=VLOOKUP(what-you-want-to-find,range-to-search-in,column-that-contains-the-match,FALSE) FALSE is for finding an exact match

so, assuming ID is in column A on each sheet and "status update" is in column E...
=VLOOKUP(A2,'Sheet2'!$A$2:$E$12,5,FALSE)
If you want to error trap (ie, hide the errors for a "not found") then use this.
for 2003...
=iferror(VLOOKUP(A2,'Sheet2'!$A$2:$E$12,5,FALSE),"",VLOOKUP(A2,'Sheet2'!$A$2:$E$12,5,FALSE))
for 2007 onwards...
=iferror(VLOOKUP(A2,'Sheet2'!$A$2:$E$12,5,FALSE),"")