I just started getting into excel mostly to make my job a bit easier. I am would concider myself a novice. I also know a lot of programming, but am not familiar with Excels programming.

Anyways to the question.

I have a table that is set up with a column to enter an item and then the rest of the columns are used to mark which department that item belongs to. There are a few problems I have with this.

One is the fact that there are so many departments that the user has to scroll sideways if the item belongs to a later department.

The second is that the only way to tell department is by a code at the beginning of the product number. There are about 300 different codes corresponding to 5 departments.

My question is this: Is there any way at all to make it so when the user scans in a product number it will look at the first three letters and automatically scroll over to the right department.

It would be awesome if the user could also change which codes correspond to which department, so storing the values in an editable table maybe. But I think that is something I could figure out if I know how to do the first part.

Thank you in advance for your help.
Tom