Column ordering function/process

Hi,

Thank you for giving me the possibility of posting here my issue. I am a Surgeon, and I am doing a research project. My job is to perform a chart review and record patient's variables. Thus the structure of my excel files is pretty simple: patient identifier=rows and variables=columns.

My issue is the following: I have some patients(=rows) that are missing in one file but are present in another file. Thus the goal is to bring some rows (i.e. patients) from one file to another. The problem is that since the variables (=columns) are slightly different (for number and quality) from file to file, I cannot copy and paste. The fastest thing that I came up is just manually ordering the columns on one file so that it has the same order of the other file (at the cost of adding blank columns). Nevertheless, this is a very lengthy and time-consuming process since I have almost 300 columns in each file.

Long story short: is there a function that could help me ordering the columns of one file so that they correspond to that of another file?
If I could achieve this, then I could perform a simple copy paste of the rows I am interested in from file to file.


Any other idea is appreciated, but please try to avoid a VBA solution since I do not know anything about it (at the first issue I would be screwed).


Thank you!


Cheers

Originally Posted by mrice

I suggest that you investigate using the VLOOKUP function. See Excel help for details.

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your suggestion. I am familiar with the VLOOKUP function since it turns out to be very handy for what I do. However I do not see how could it turn useful in this case. Do you mind explaining?

Thanks

you are right mrice! This is a great idea and does the trick.
However, the situation is much more complicated than what I described since I already have quite a bit of data for those missing patients (their row is actually already present in the first file but with just some variables recorded).

I think that this detail makes things a little to challenging.

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