Forum Discussion
Index & Match based on a substring of the look up value contained in a 2-dimension array
If I may, a few suggestions to modifying the formula:
1) change Search(F2:I6, A2) to Search(A2, F2:I6). I believe blank cells in your data will match to A2 and could return incorrect results, but it won't match in the other direction.
2) Instead of hardcoding the array of 1's, you could use TRANSPOSE(COLUMN($F$2:$I$2)) - if you insert columns, the formula should update.
3) Try --(MMULT(...)>0). If you had "red apple" and "green apple" in the same row, mmult would return 2 for that row (searching for "apple"), causing match to fail (as match is looking for "1"). Also, using column() in #2 instead of an array of 1's makes this necessary.
4) You could wrap the formula with Iferror for instances where nothing matches.
Note you will need to use Ctrl+Shift+Enter if you don't have office 365 (because of the transpose function):
=IFERROR(INDEX($E$2:$E$6,MATCH(1,--(MMULT(--(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(A2,$F$2:$I$6))),TRANSPOSE(COLUMN($F$2:$I$2)))>0),0)), "No Match")
=INDEX($E$2:$E$6,MATCH(1,MMULT(--(ISNUMBER(SEARCH($F$2:$I$6,A2))),{1;1;1;1}),0))
Maybe with this formula as shown in the attached file.
If I may, a few suggestions to modifying the formula:
1) change Search(F2:I6, A2) to Search(A2, F2:I6). I believe blank cells in your data will match to A2 and could return incorrect results, but it won't match in the other direction.
2) Instead of hardcoding the array of 1's, you could use TRANSPOSE(COLUMN($F$2:$I$2)) - if you insert columns, the formula should update.
3) Try --(MMULT(...)>0). If you had "red apple" and "green apple" in the same row, mmult would return 2 for that row (searching for "apple"), causing match to fail (as match is looking for "1"). Also, using column() in #2 instead of an array of 1's makes this necessary.
4) You could wrap the formula with Iferror for instances where nothing matches.
Note you will need to use Ctrl+Shift+Enter if you don't have office 365 (because of the transpose function):
=IFERROR(INDEX($E$2:$E$6,MATCH(1,--(MMULT(--(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(A2,$F$2:$I$6))),TRANSPOSE(COLUMN($F$2:$I$2)))>0),0)), "No Match")- After using OliverScheurich formula for a while I saw two inefficiencies that I was able to address using JMB17 suggestions above.
Inefficiency #1 was the "ROW(1:11)^0" which I changed to TRANSPOSE(COLUMN($F$2:$I$2). The row option made is such that each row had a different number, for example row 3 would have the formula above translated to "ROW(3:13)" and when these rows would be reordered (maybe ordered A-Z vs Z-A for different reasons), al the formulas were highlighted as inconsistent. This could hide a real error message, and also it was very inefficient. Now that they are frozen to a specific 15 columns, I also do not have to worry about accidently deleting those columns and creating another error.
Inefficiency #2: Not using the "IFERROR" function. When I added new data into the table that had not been indexed yet, the result could not return a match and would return an N/A which other mathematical functions in other tables could not translate and those tables were then broken. Using the IFERROR function allows me to flag those that do not match, while also not breaking other formulas that are depending on the match results.Since you spoke about XLOOKUP() in very first post of this thread, I believe you are on Excel 365 or 2021. If so why don't use SEQUENCE(), LET(), etc to make formula more transparent and reliable?
Thank you for your suggestions JMB17, the transpose suggestion worked once I also included the NOT(ISBLANK) suggestion by OliverScheurich . However, I tried to execute suggestions #1 and #3, but the formula would return an error message. I am particularly interested in addressing the issue of MMULT when the search term "Ana's Grocery Market" matches two options under the "grocery category" which has "grocery" and "market" in the same row. I notice that the match fails. How can I fix that?
- Can you upload a sample workbook to see what you have (without any sensitive information)? After clicking on "reply" click "open full text editor" and you should see an option to upload a file. It works fine for me, so I'm not going to be able to re-create your problem without looking at the same thing you are.
- I checked again, and the formula provided by OliverScheurich works when there is NO EMPTY cells within the search array. My search array does have empty cells, so I filled them with a value that would not result in a false positive (is unlikely to be found in my search list). This is a great short-term fix. If there is a workaround filling empty cells, I would be happy to learn more.
=INDEX($E$2:$E$6,MATCH(1,MMULT(--(ISNUMBER(SEARCH($F$2:$P$6,A2)))*NOT(ISBLANK($F$2:$P$6)),{1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1}),0))
This formula takes into account empty cells and works for 11 options in my sheet. Unfortunately, when I made my first suggestion, I didn't consider the empty cells.
- Thank you OliverScheurich. The formula works fantastic. I did notice that when the search item meets more than one option in a row, that the match fails. Unfortunately, this will be a common issue in my database because I am trying to categorize based on broad yet similar words that are likely to occur together in real scenarios, thus defeating the purpose of creating the formula in the first place.
