Forum Discussion
Lookup/Autofill function
Kathy -- someone else may have a more direct answer (more satisfying)....So far as I'm aware, there is no FORMULA or FUNCTION for what you're asking. There conceivably could be a macro or VBA routine, but that seems like overkill at this point.
If I were sitting down with you face-to-face, I'd have a bunch of questions before we went any further. Such as
- What is the bigger picture here? What is the purpose you're working to serve?
- What else are you expecting on sheet two, once "Pepsi" gets filled in? Are you going to be adding data about "Pepsi" or are you wanting data to be retrieved from somewhere? Where?
- Will "Pepsi" (using it as a stand-in here for any name, just as you did) ...will "Pepsi" being appearing only once on sheet 2, or is it possible it will appear multiple times? If the latter, what will be different about the multiple occurrences?
Why ask all those questions? Well, it's not that I'm nosy. Really. But how we approach answering your very first question might change depending on that bigger picture, the ultimate purposes, etc.
mathetes Just looking to fill a sheet with vendors every week that we paid. So this week I paid 20 different companies. Next week I paid 30.......some the same as last week. Just the name on the sheet and that is it. I just don't want to have to keep typing every single vendor name each week on a spreadsheet. If there is an auto fill or something....
If that's really ALL you're doing, just a list of names and you start over each week with mostly the same names, then a simple solution is to keep it all on one sheet. Excel is generally "smart enough," when you're using a lot of the same names (same texts) and repeating them in the same column, to prompt you with the complete name once it recognizes a unique set of letters. Try it.
And you can just enter the week (the monday or friday of whatever) once and copy to the other entries for that same week.
But just to underscore here, you're really not using Excel for any special purposes, using any of its data analysis purposes or anything like that, right? If you are, if at the end of the year you want to know how many times you'd paid "Pepsi" for example, we'd possibly want to get more sophisticated.