Beginner reconciliation help: Required to define transactions into categories

One of the really useful functions to learn about in Excel is VLOOKUP (and related functions XLOOKUP, HLOOKUP and LOOKUP). Essentially, you have a table somewhere on your sheet made up of 2 or more columns, the first column contains values to be searched for and the other columns are the corresponding values to be returned if the lookup is successful. VLOOKUP allows wildcard characters, so you can look for partial matches using these. It is well worth getting to know more about these functions.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Thanks, i briefly looked up on the LOOKUP functions. Here I made an example formula: =VLOOKUP("Charge for"&"*", O1:O1424, 15, "B"), and it returns back #VALUE. If I'm missing out on any of the criterion, I would describe my formula to look for a string of "Charge for" followed by anything else that comes afterwards (&"*"), at cell O with a given range at column 15. If it finds "Charge for" and an e-mail in my situation, it will return output "B". Could you help me out on this? Thanks

Try this formula in B3:

=IF(LEFT(K3,3)="for","A",IF(LEFT(K3,10)="Charge For","B",IF(LEFT(K3,9)="X - Order","C",FALSE)))

then copy down. The reason I suggested putting it in column B is so that you can compare the results with your other formula directly. You can see that your formula is matching with "for" within the text in some instances, rather than at the beginning of the text which my formula does.

Hope this helps.

Pete

The next step is to find the customers name. I used

=MID(K3, FIND("for ", K3) + 4, FIND(",",K3) - FIND("for ", K3) - 4)

to find the string between the distance of "for" and ",", yet I again get the return of #VALUE. Any advice?

Attach your workbook again with that formula in it, and I'll take a look at it later.

Pete