Forum Discussion
Putting words into categories and showing the category rather than the word in each cell
Hello, I am wanting to know how to put words into categories. So for example if I have 3 different lists of words I want them to be assigned either category 1, 2, or 3.
And then rather than the word showing up in the cell I would like to change this to the category number. So If I believe right, I need to code the words to show as their category number. For example, if the word "verdict" is in category 1 then show "1" instead of "verdict", if the word "justice" is in category 2 then show "2" instead of "justice". How would I put my word lists into categories and then show that category number in the cell rather than the word item.
I am new to excel and this is really important as it is for my masters experiment - I need to be able to correlate the written responses but I cannot do this with words so I need to change the words to numbers. - any help will be very appreciated.
Thank you, Siobhan!
15 Replies
Siobhan- Put all your words in one column and the number you want to attach to it in the one next to it. Then you can use one of Excels lookup functions (XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH) to look-up the word and returns its number.
Hi Riny_van_Eekelen , thank you for this! I have done as you said with the words and the number I want to attach to them but when I try the lookup functions it is saying incorrect formula. I have just watched a tutorial to change them using a replace function and that has replaced the word with the number but only in the replace column and not in my word column.
Essentially I think I need to assign my 3 different word lists to 3 different numbers, so that when participants write down a specific word from say category 1, excel will show 1 instead of the word.
Thank you for your help!
Siobhan- Perhaps the attached workbook will help you solve your problem. If not, please upload an example of your workbook so that we can have a look at it.
