Question

I have a quick question.

I have an Excel sheet.. which contains descriptions of certain items:For example:

1) Awesome mirror
2) Another Awesome mirror
3) beautiful table
4) Pretty beautiful lovely sofa
5) one more mirror

and so on...

So lets say, I want to place all the mirrors together, all the tables together…
and so on… so basically something which can return me all the instances which contain the word “mirror”.

Any ideas on how to solve about this?

Answer 1

You could use a formula solution as below:

=SUM(COUNTIF(A1,"*"&{"table","mirror","sofa"}&"*")*{1,100,1000})

will give
table a score of 1
mirror a score of 100
sofa a score of 1000

allowing an easy numerical sort.

If it was possible that a cell could contain both mirror and sofa then it would get a score of 101. In this case you may either:

• be happy to have a separate list of multi-matches
• I could further adapt the formula if you can provide how you would like a multi-match handled.