Forum Discussion
jojomartin845
May 01, 2026Copper Contributor
Put a specific word in a cell based on the word in another cell
Hey everyone, I need help automating the categorisation of my bank statement in excel. I do not have microsoft 365. I want excel to look for specific words from my transactions eg Woolworths or McD...
PeterBartholomew1
May 04, 2026Silver Contributor
I only consider using 365, preferably insider beta.
My strategy is to search for the presence of each merchant within the description, returning the corresponding category where successful. Because there is the possibility that more than one merchant could be present on a single row, concatenation reduces the categories to a scalar. This reverse lookup is given by
Worksheet formula
= REVLOOKUPλ(description, merchant, category)
where
REVLOOKUPλ = LAMBDA(descr, merch, cat,
MAP(descr, LAMBDA(d,
CONCAT(
MAP(merch, cat, LAMBDA(m, c,
XLOOKUP(m, d, c, "", 3))
)
)
))
);