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Matteo Beretta's avatar
Matteo Beretta
Copper Contributor
Mar 25, 2018

Messing up with a database...

Hi guys,

I need the help of some experts...

I have been asked to prepare a document to be printed (each page on an A5 sheet) containing the list of members (and personal info) of a bird keepers society together with the type of birds they have/breed.

I already got an excel file with their ID, name, address, phone no., email address... i would have to add the type of birds only (right now, we are collecting the sheets with this piece of information)... so as an input, I will have what you can see in the attached file (sheets "input" or "alternative input".... which one do you think is the best for what I need to do after?)

Ok, so starting with this, I would need to produce 2 outputs... one with the members sorted by name (sheet "Ordered -Names"). Which might look simple, but I would like to have an empty row between each member (highlighted in yellow) and the name+info written only once (compare this output to "alternative input" to see what I mean). Ideally, because of the lack of space in the book, i would prefer an output like in the sheet "Ordered -Name IDEAL", but I doubt that would be possible...

For the second output, I would have to prepare a list, in which I sort the type of birds in alphabetical order, and next to that, all the members having those birds (also in alphabetical order), as you can see in the sheet "Ordered -Types".

How can i do that? The 2 outputs I am showing you were made manually, but consider that the society has more than 300 members, so you can see how long it would take me... plus everytime something changes, I would have to manually correct the outputs, increasing the chance of error/missmatches... any idea? it has not to be done with Excel necessarily (I got a good knowledge of it, while for example I know little about access... but happy to try with anything that would work!).
This work was used to be done by another person using MAPPER (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAPPER) but it is something very old... He only could do it, but unfortunately he died few months ago, so we would need something to be done...

I am open to any suggestion...

Thanks a lot in advance

Matteo

  • Matt Mickle's avatar
    Matt Mickle
    Bronze Contributor

    Matteo-

     

    What your asking can definitely be accomplished with VBA (macros).  It will take a someone a fair amount of time to code you a solution.  I would suggest posting your questions separately and building on the answers you receive.  For example if you have 20 steps to get to your end result then separate them out in individual posts.  If you do this you will get a better response.  Its more likely that 20 people will take 10 minutes to answer your smaller steps then someone taking 200 minutes to complete your full project.

     

    Here are some tips for posting questions on forums:

     

    https://www.thespreadsheetguru.com/gethelp/?rq=Questions

     

    That being said if you choose to use the alternative format you can make a simple refreshable pivot table to get to your "Ordered-Name" worksheet. (See Attached)

     

     

     

     

     

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