Combining county data sets where order of counties is mismatched

**ClaraEB** · 09-15-2020, 04:01 PM

Hello,

I am trying to compile county-level variables from various data sets into one excel sheet so that I can run a regression on them. The problem is that the orders of the counties in the data sets are not identical, and the data sets are all missing different counties, so I can't just copy and paste the variables because then I'll have the wrong values for the counties.

I'm not an excel expert by any means so maybe there's a formula or something I'm missing, or maybe I just have to do it manually (I really hope not because there are thousands of counties).

I've been using vlookup to do it, but I've only managed to use that to find which counties are missing, it doesn't help me with making sure the different variables have all the counties in the correct order...

If it's helpful I can link a spreadsheet with only a few counties to give an idea of what I mean, any help is much appreciated :)

Thanks!

**vba_php** · 09-15-2020, 08:58 PM

I would assume that the sorting function in excel could help you greatly in this regard. USE it on every set and then more than likely it becomes easy. as a last resort, you could loop the range from top to bot. on every sheet using a RANGE object and compare appropriately.