Excel formulas

(My point on the matter of sorting was to challenge the fact that you have two sheets, one sorted one way, the other another. Why two sheets?)

I was finally able to download your sample sheets this time. I'll have to say (in all honesty) that I'd most likely take a totally different approach (I think) to designing your "InputSept19" sheet. It looks like you're trying to do several things at once, possibly....track what each student has ordered (or how much to charge on a school bill) or some such.....AND track how many different entrees get ordered on different days of the month, for Kitchen Inventory purposes. So let me leave it at that for now and try to address your immediate question.

The VLOOKUP function might accomplish what you're trying to do. You'd use the SchoolID field as the key identifier in the formula--it's unique to each student, where the name is not necessarily unique--and then retrieve the data in the row and column you want by means of that.

HOWEVER the way your INPUT sheet is designed is not ideal for that purpose, (or at least it's not clear to me what the underlying pattern is, and how it might be made consistent from month to month. Is it only column I (as in I388) that you are looking for. In your live spreadsheet, it seemed to me you were pulling from column AQ, which carries the heading "Total Milk" ... so I'm asking is that always what you want? AQ4, then AQ5, then AQ6,....? If so, VLOOKUP could work.

But before we go forward (unless some other reader here has another idea) could you spend some time talking about what your underlying purpose is with these two spreadsheets? It looks like you're tracking something to do with lunch orders per student, but at what level of detail, etc.

The more complete your description of the "business need" here, the more we can help in the design, which might mean more than simply giving you a formula. You want to do more than put a bandage on the problem; you want to solve the underlying need.