merging data from multiple non-standardized workbooks into one summary worksheet

Hello,

I am attempting to write code for a macro that can cycle through about 30 excel workbooks and merge the data. getting the raw data on one sheet is not a problem, but I also need to sort similar data into corresponding columns while merging such that all data from the workbooks with a certain column heading will be in a single column with a single heading on the summary sheet. The problem is that the column headings on the source workbooks are not always standardized, i.e. "F high", "high F". Each sheet has several columns that look like the one below, with a header at the top and a series of numbers. (please ignore the dashes, I just used them to line up the columns in this post, in excel each value is in a different cell)


F Low---F High---V Low
721-----999---804
721-----999---0
721-----999---0
711-----720---786
711-----720---713


My vba skills are very basic, so I have been approaching this problem with a mountain of if..else and InStr commands, which doesn't seem like the best method and isn't working. Could anyone help me with this sorting problem? Any help at all would be very much appreciated.

Thank you

thank you mrice. so after pulling all the headers to a separate table, wold a lookup table allow me to assign groups of headers to to specific headers for the final compilation?

I have been trying to research using lookup tables in excel, but cant find any very useful. would you know of an good places to read up about them?

thanks again for the help