Filtering for multiple cell values?

**TheJohan4721** · 04-12-2012, 01:02 PM

Not very experienced with excel, so any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Basically, I have a huge list of all items found in our hospital and what locations these items can be found in. I am trying to create another spreadsheet that displays all duplicate items (items that can be found in more than 1 location). This new spreadsheet needs to be derived from a list of items that I specify from the original spreadsheet. I can filter them all individually to determine the duplicates, but this is time consuming considering that I am dealing with over 1700 items. Is there any way I can select a range of item numbers and have excel pull up all of the other rows that contain those same item numbers?

It's confusing to explain, so let me know if I can provide any more specifics.

Thanks in advance

**rvasquez** · 04-12-2012, 01:14 PM

Hello,

Look at the below link for all possibilities:

http://www.mrexcel.com/tip138.shtml

Thanks!

**TheJohan4721** · 04-14-2012, 11:45 AM

Very helpful, but my only problem is that I need to be able to choose specific items from a larger list. For instance, these tips only determine duplicates across an entire list of data. I need to be able to select the range of data and find any duplicates that are found throughout a larger set of data. An example would be if I had a list of randomly generated numbers 1-10 and I needed to find out how many 3's and 7's are on the list.

**TheJohan4721** · 04-14-2012, 12:09 PM

I guess the only difference between what I'm working with and the example I gave is that instead of a list of numbers 1-10, i have a list of item #'s that is 20,000 rows long and instead of searching for duplicate 3's and 7's, I'm looking for duplicates from another list that has about 700 rows. That's why it's difficult for me to do a vlookup or anything else on such a small scale.

**FDibbins** · 04-14-2012, 07:19 PM

as a work-around, you could add a helper column with a modified vlookup to search for duplicates, and return a "unique" code/number/word for each set of duplicates. then you could use filters to isolate those duplicates.

If this is something that might help, send me a sample and I will put something together for you to try

**TheJohan4721** · 04-17-2012, 10:45 AM

That sounds very promisng. I appreciate the advice, but am not sure exactly how I would go about doing so. How would you want a sample sent to you? I could attach the entire spreadsheet but it's quite large. The cells look like this with the columns in parentheses;

2 Department (A) Area (B) Description (C) Item Number (D) Manufacturer and Pricing Info (F-L)
3

I'm trying to use the item numbers from a specific department (cells D26136-D27960) and cross reference them with the entire spreadsheet (39,434 rows) to determine what other departments and areas these items can be found in.

Let me know if there is any other info that I can provide, and thanks again.

**FDibbins** · 04-18-2012, 07:38 AM

If you could make a copy of your file, leave enough records to work with, and show me a sample of what you are trying to achieve, we can start working on something for you

**TheJohan4721** · 04-19-2012, 09:38 AM

Every time I try to upload the file, it says that the upload failed. I even tried to delete rows to reduce the file size, with no luck.

Is there not enough information in my earlier post?

Thanks again