寻求帮助以在 Excel 中表现出色

Question

This pictures shows my table and formula's yield

I have used following formula to extract result from a table.

Its working perfectly fine but I am hoping to level up my understanding of Excel formulas.

The trouble is that I use IF in Excel way to often.

what I wanted to know is if its possible to use a different approach, something that can work similar to if but is perhaps more sophisticated.

=IF(OR(J2="08L",J2="08R"),IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(LEFT(I2,3),'SID separations'!$D$34,0)),"LAM",IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(LEFT(I2,3),'SID separations'!$D$35:$E$35,0)),"West",IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(LEFT(I2,3),'SID separations'!$D$36:$G$36,0)),"East",IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(LEFT(I2,3),'SID separations'!$D$37,0)),"SFD",NA())))),0)

I very much appreciate any help.

Answer 1

Now that there is an example, I think this is a good question. You've recognised that your formula is fairly messy and also can't be easily expanded if there are more routes.

The problem is that Excel is very good for searching for a value in a single row or column, but not as good for searching for a value in a block of data.

You can simplify this problem by creating an additional column that has each entire route in a single cell. You can do this just by concatenating values. In your example, use column H:

=B2&" "&C2&" "&D2&" "&E2&" "&F2&" "&G2

This will create a string with the entire route in a single cell. Spaces are added in between each part of the route to make sure you don't accidentally create a sequences of letters that matches part of another route. It doesn't matter if there are blank cells, there will just be some extra spaces at the end which doesn't matter. Fill this down the column to get the entire path for each route in a single cell.

Then, you can create a formula that tries to find the 3 letters anywhere in any of the full routes.

=INDEX($A$2:$A$5,MATCH("*"&left(I2,3)&"*",$H$2:$H$5,0))

This formula is basically a deconstructed vlookup. It determines where the 3 characters can be found in column H, then gives back the corresponding value from column A.

The MATCH function tries to find the left 3 characters of I2 in column H. The MATCH function normally tries to find a complete exact match (with the last parameter being equal to 0), but we can just add wildcards to the search value. The MATCH function then returns the index of the range where it was found. Ie, if it was found in the 2nd cell of the range H2:H5, it returns the number 2.

The INDEX function then just gets a value from a range based on an index. In this case, it will get the 2nd value from range A2:A5.