Compare spreadsheets in Excel and highlight missing data

Question

Stumped on this one! It's for a work project. I'm assuming VLookUp is the answer but I don't have enough experience the function to make it work. Your help is appreciated in advance.

I've got a spreadsheet that contains raw consumer data (SP1). The data is then imported to a scrubbing system, which removes records based on certain criteria. Once the list is scrubbed down, I export it back to Excel (SP2).

The task: to identify records that originally existed on SP1 but were scrubbed from SP2. Ideally, I'd like to include some kind of conditional formatting so these cells are highlighted in red on SP1.

You'll notice a lot of columns are hidden. My columns are:

  F           G         I        J        K        P
  Name        Address   City     State    Zip      Phone

Possible wrinkle: All the information in SP1 is captalized, whereas all the information in SP2 is lowercase. This is our my scrubbing system exports it. Will this be an issue for the function?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

I would suggest those (I'm assuming that the sheets are called SP1 and SP2 respectively):

1. Create an additional column containing the those six columns concatenated together in both worksheets (In row 2 for example, you can use either =CONCATENATE(F2, G2, I2, J2, K2, P2) or F2&G2&I2&J2&K2&P2 ). Let's say that this is column Q in both worksheets.
2. Select the column in SP1 that you just did and go to 'Conditional Formatting' > 'New Rule' > 'Use a formula to determine which cells to format'.
3. Put in the formula =iserror(match(Q1,SP2!Q:Q,0)) and click on 'Format...' > 'Fill' and pick the colour you prefer (red in your case).
4. Click 'OK' twice and this should do the trick.

It might take a while to process if you have a lot of data. It will highlight all the cells in SP1 in the column Q. You can then use a filter on colours to make things faster.