Compare Data from 2 Worksheets in Excel 2011

Question

I have an excel workbook with 2 sheets of alphabetical business listings, one from this year and the other from last year. The 2012 listings have categories assigned to them, the 2013 ones don't.

I want to copy the categories from the 2012 listings to the 2013 listings that still exist. How would I go about doing this? I've done a lot of Googling about it and have come up empty as to how I would tackle this.

2012 Listings

Business Name     Category
Business A        Services       
Business B        Shopping
Business C        Automotive

New 2013 Listings

Business Name     Category
Business A        Services       
Business C        Automotive
New Business      ???

For the new businesses I need to manually decide what they fall under, but as it stands I don't even know which businesses need categories. There are a lot of other columns, but they don't really matter per say in this issue.

My experience with Excel is quite limited, so any hand holding you can provide will help. Thanks.

Answer 1

Assuming that your 2012 listing is in Sheet1 and the header row starts in A1, with a similar setup for 2013 in Sheet2. Then the following lookup formula, beginning in cell B2 (or another column), of Sheet2 will bring over the categories:

  =VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet1!$A$2:$B$6,2,0)

If there was no category assigned in 2012 to a business listed in 2013, this formula will return a N/A error value showing that you need to assign a category.