Combining Excel sheets/groups of columns by a condition in Excel 2007

Question

Is there a way to combine 2 Excel sheets (or groups of columns inside one Excel sheet) so that the rows in one sheet/group append to the other sheet/group where so that certain columns values match. To clarify: Lets say I have 2 sheets - Sheet1 and Sheet2. Sheet1 has the columns A,B,C,D. Sheet2 has columns A,E,F,G. Column A in both sheets contains the same data but differently sorted (it is not sorted in conventional way (alphabetically or numerically)). I need to combine these 2 sheets into one, but they need to be combined so that the values in A column match (if possible the result should be ordered in the same way as the Sheet2). Ideally, the functionality I'm looking for would need to be like SQL's INNER JOIN command.

I'm using Excel 2007.

Thanks

Answer 1

I think you basically described the VLOOKUP function.

You have your two sheets, now you want to create a list, which extends A,B,C,D to A,B,C,D,E,F,G.

For that, you could just use

Sheet1!E1=VLOOKUP(Sheet1!A1,Sheet2!A:G,5,FALSE)
Sheet1!F1=VLOOKUP(Sheet1!A1,Sheet2!A:G,6,FALSE)
Sheet1!G1=VLOOKUP(Sheet1!A1,Sheet2!A:G,7,FALSE)

If you need to create an extra sheet3 as a result, use this:

Sheet3!A1=Sheet1!A1
Sheet3!B1=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!A1,Sheet1!A:D,2,FALSE)
Sheet3!C1=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!A1,Sheet1!A:D,3,FALSE)
Sheet3!D1=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!A1,Sheet1!A:D,4,FALSE)
Sheet3!E1=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!A1,Sheet2!A:G,5,FALSE)
Sheet3!F1=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!A1,Sheet2!A:G,6,FALSE)
Sheet3!G1=VLOOKUP(Sheet3!A1,Sheet2!A:G,7,FALSE)

Hope this interpretation was correct.

Edit:

By the way, because Excel is not mainly intended to function as a database, this operation is a bit messy, because it does not dynamically scale. At least with the second approach, using a thrid sheet. You will have to copy down A1 at least that far, to match the last used row from Sheet1. And if you should copy it down further, so you won't have to worry about it for a while, you might need to error-proof against the empty cells.