Question

I have two spreadsheets, one is a backup from an ecommerce store which contains data like product_id, name etc and another contains just a product name and a colour e.g:

Book 1:

product_id | name
     1       product one
     2       product two
     3       product three

Book 2:

name          | colour
product one     Red
product one     Green
product two     Red
product two     Purple

What I need to do is replace every product name in Book 2 with the corresponding product_id from Book 1

Is there a formula that would do this? Doing it manually is out of the question as there are 40000 lines in book 2!

Answer 1

In C2 of Book2 put this formula, replacing 1000 with the number of the last row in Book1. Drag down as far as needed:

=INDEX([Book1]Sheet1!$A$2:$A$1000,MATCH(A2,[Book1]Sheet1!$B$2:$B$1000,0))

Then copy column C and Paste Special > Values over column A (the name column).