Vlookup with repeated entries/categories

[Mr.Fish]

Example of what I'm trying to accomplish:

Groceries 10/9/11 Publix PUBLIX #370 ORLANDO FL 13
Groceries 10/10/11 Publix PUBLIX #663 BRANDON FL 56.69
Television 10/10/11 Verizon VERIZON*ONETIMEPAY 800-483-3000 TX 72.32

Trying to get categories to automatically populate in from a list of transactions such as above for a budget.

I have my worksheets set up by Month so I want for example all the Grocery transactions to populate under Groceries in my October field. Kind of like vlookup except that does not work in this situation since there is more than one "groceries."

I can do the check for month, what I am having trouble with is getting it to show all the transactions in the Oct worksheet.
Attached an example, I want the groceries to auto populate in the manner I manually did it in the attachment.

Please let me know if you need more clarification.

[icestationzbra]

you might get dinged for the title of your thread - see if you can rename it to something descriptive such as 'vlookup and categorisation for budget transactions'.

see if the attached helps. if it does, then try to see if you can extrapolate it other columns.

[Mr.Fish]

Brilliant! Utilizing Small was just what was needed.

[icestationzbra]

courtesy Wikipedia:

{ } — curly brackets, definite brackets, swirly brackets, curly braces, birdie brackets, Scottish brackets, squirrelly brackets, braces, gullwings, seagull, fancy brackets, or DeLorean Brackets

in excel they appear when a formula being confirmed is a CSE or Array formula - CSE stands for Control-Shift-Enter. such formulae are confirmed not just with Enter, but with Control+Shift+Enter. when you select an array formula cell and click inside the formula bar, the { } disappear, and reappear if you do not hit Enter to exit (Escape is OK). if you hit Enter, they go away. bringing them back is as simple as editing (e.g., F2 in the cell) that formula again and hitting Control+Shift+Enter again.

[Mr.Fish]

Thanks I was able to find that out before you posted with some googling, thats why I edited the previous post before you posted the wiki. Sorry for making you post, once I read your signature I found more on it. I'm having trouble incorporating a check for month (to only get October transactions in this case) into your formula however.

[icestationzbra]

see if this helps:

[Mr.Fish]

I guess I need practice with index/arrays, I was trying to do the "*(TEXT(INDEX(db,0,2),"mmmm-yyyy")=$B$2&"-"&$C$2)" with "*Month(..." and having trouble trying to point it to the associated month. I was able to follow what you did though, so nice little practice for me to track how the array was working. Thanks!