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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T01:51:12+00:00

i’m writing a program at work for a categorizing issue. i get data in

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i’m writing a program at work for a categorizing issue.
i get data in the form of CODE, DESCRIPTION, SUB-TOTAL for example:

LIQ013     COGNAC     25
LIQ023     VODKA      21
FD0001     PRETZELS   10
PP0502     NAPKINS    5

Now it all generally follows something like this…the problem is my company supplies numerous different bars. So there are like 800 records a month with data like this. My boss wants to breakdown the data so she knows how much we spend on a certain category each month. For example:

ALCOHOL 46 
FOOD    10
PAPER   5

What I’ve thought of is I setup a sort of "data-base" which is really a csv text file that contains entries like this:

LIQ,COGNAC,ALCOHOL
LIQ,VODKA,ALCOHOL
FD,PRETZELS,FOOD
FD,POPCORN,FOOD

I’ve already written code that imports the database as a worksheet and separates each field into its own column. I want excel to look through the file and when it sees LIQ and COGNAC to assign it the ALCOHOL designator. That way I can use a pivot table to get the category sums. For example I want the final product to look like this:

LIQ013     COGNAC     25     ALCOHOL
LIQ023     VODKA      21     ALCOHOL
FD0001     PRETZELS   10     FOOD
PP0502     NAPKINS    5      PAPER

Does anyone have any suggestions? My worry is that a single point expression match to JUST the code i.e. just to LIQ without a match to COGNAC as well would maybe result in problems later when there are conflicting descriptions? I’d also like the user to be able to add ledger entries so that the database of recognized terms grows and becomes more expansive and hopefully more accurate.

EDIT

as per @Marc ‘s request i’m including my solution:

code
file

please note that this is a pretty dumb-ed down solution. i removed a bunch of the fail-safes and other bits of code that were relevant to a robust code but not to our particular solution.

in order to get this to work there are two parts:

the first is the macro source code
the second is the actual file

because all the fail-safes are removed, the file needs to be imported to excel exactly the way it appears. i.e. Sheet1 on the googleDoc should be Sheet1 on the excel, start pasting data at cell "A1". before the macro is run, be sure to select cell "A1" in Sheet1. as i said, there are implementations in the finished product to make it more user friendly! enjoy!

EDIT2

These links suck. They don’t paste well into excel.
If your comfortable with it I can email you the actual workbook. Which would help in preserving the formatting etc.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use a lookup table in a separate sheet. Column A of the lookup sheet contains the lookup value (e.g. PRETZELS), Column B contains the category (FOOD, ALCOHOL, etc). In the cells where you want the category to show up in your original sheet (let’s use D3 for the result where B3 holds the “PRETZELS” value), type this formula:

    =VLOOKUP(B3,OtherSheet!$A$1:$B$500,2,FALSE)

    That assumes that your lookup table is in range A1:B500 of a worksheet named “OtherSheet”.

    This formula tells Excel to find the lookup value (B3) in column A of your lookup and return the corresponding value from column B of your lookup table. Absolute references (the $) ensure that your formula won’t increment cell references when you copy/paste the formula in other cells.

    When you get new categories and/or inventory, you can update your lookup table in this one place by just adding new rows to it.

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