Stepping stone to create word identification in excel

[a_driga]

Dear gurus,

I am stumbling on a problem which I have not yet get an idea on how to proceed. I need to be able to sort out purchase order from our database (numbering thousands of lines in excel sheet) and try to figure out the category of this PO.

The idea is to be able to detect a PO without material identification number which supposedly released using material identification number. Previously, I have manually sort thousand of rows by trying to check whether a keyword existed in the description column of the purchase order. The formula used is simply countifs(checked cell, "*" & keyword & "*"). Based on the keywords.. (I used 145 keywords so far), I categorize them into smaller list of group (now it is 16). Thereafter, I can conclude which PO supposedly accompanied with material identification number.

The problem with this method is, it can return multiple answer thus reducing the accuracy. Secondly, it is fully manual whilst in the future, they would like to have this report on weekly basis. So I am thinking of having a quasi-automated way to do the analysis or fully automated..

I am apologize for not being able to attach example as the data might be confidential, and I am also not been able to put any file with macro in it. So if someone can assist in solving this problem, I will be most delighted..

Thanks in advance.

PS: I know Excel might not be the right tool to do such thing, but this is about the only tool available for me to analyse the data.

[Arkadi]

Without a sample sheet it is hard to understand what exactly needs to be done. Can you make a copy of the sheet with a small sample of data? It does not have to be REAL data, but it needs to show us what your sheet looks like, and if possible also show us the wanted result.