excel - i need to take a value from column a match to column be and return a value in a cell adjacent to column b

Question

sheet 1 Column A contains a list of players names. Beside their name is their ranking (1-200) Sheet 2 contains the same setup but the rankings are from a different website, so players names will not match character for character. one site might list player as CJ anderson, another site site might list player as CJ Anderson

What I want to do is create a sheet that will list a players name and in the adjacent columns show their rankings from each site

example Player name CBS Rank ESPN Rank NFL rank

I need to take a players name, search a column for it in another sheet, and return the adjacent value (players rank)

I've tried using vlookup without success

Answer 1

So any of the lookup or indexing functions or advanced if functions will treat cj Anderson as different from cj anderson. Your answer will require some data cleaning. But to remove the periods in that case, try =substitute ((cell that cj Anderson is in), ".", ""). That should turn cj Anderson into cj anderson.

Answer 2

There is no way to do this fully automatically. But you can clean up the data to get yourself close. In addition to substitute use trim to remove extraneous spaces before and after. Then use Text to Columns to get last names. Add a column that counts the frequency of each last name, and then filter to counts >1 so you only work on people with the same last name as unique last names will allow you look up that way.