Thanks for your help! I continued to work on it too and came up with an alternate work around for the multiple last names after I realized that even though that two sheets were pulling the data from the same database (and thus the names should be output in the same way) it seemed that there were some cases where the first name was also showing a middle initial after it on one sheet but not on the other - argh! (i.e.: my original "Faculty Seniority List" sheet had a name column that would read "Thompson, Earl S." and my original "Load Hrs" sheet would have a last name column with "Thompson" and a first name column with "Earl" and the "S." was nowhere to be found....)
So on the original "Faculty Seniority List" sheet I inserted a few extra columns, and then ran a "text to columns" on the name so as to separate it out and delete the column with the middle initials. Then in another newly inserted column, I used a concatenate formula to re-combine the name without the middle initial. I then copied and pasted the values only into yet another newly inserted column. Then on my "Load Hrs." sheet I inserted a few extra columns and entered a concatenate formula again (copying and pasting the values into another new column) so that my vlookup formula would return the correct value despite there being multiple people with the same last name.
Example.xlsm
I also played around with the "Hours OK?" formula a bit in order to eliminate the min/max helper columns I had inserted so it reads like this:
I was thinking the same thing about the named table references
All that being said - you're right - 6 months from now the inner workings would SURELY be forgotten, and with the data being imported on a frequent basis (via importing a text file saved from our Datatel UI database), I'm fine with what I've got and I'm currently working on writing a macro that will do all of this for me..... but that's a whole other thread!
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