Print the results of a vlookup to a cell in excel

Question

I have been working on a solution to this problem for a few hours now and I am basically no where except knowing that I don't know how to do it...So here goes.

I want to take the original data that I have in Excel that have 'code#s' for each 'category#'. With those 'code#s', I can look up the 'category#' name.

This has been so challenging because there are a varying number of categories for every 'title#'.

I have tried printing the 'category#' name next to 'title#', but it is seemingly impossible because Excel goes through every row in the original data and gives a True, False or #N/A instead of selecting and printing only the true statements without copying down a thousand rows. I want it to go through all the possibilities and only select the categories based on the criteria that they have the same 'title#' and their lookup code matches somewhere in the lookup table.

Thanks if you can offer any sort of help.

Here are some of the formulas I have tried:

IF(AND($M$5=TOP_TREND_CONTRIBUTORS!$W$2:$W$253,MATCH(TOP_TREND_CONTRIBUTORS!$A$2:$A$253,'Category Lookup'!$D$3:$D$30,0)<>"#N/A"),TOP_TREND_CONTRIBUTORS!$A$2:$A$253,FALSE)

....where M5, W:W is the 'title#', A:A is the code for the lookup-in that part I am trying to say that they are valid if the code registers in the lookup table and the 'title#s' are equal. The last part I am trying to get it to print the 'code#s' that are valid. But that only works when I drag the formula down all the rows.

Answer 1

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just tried to get from your original data and lookup table to the final result. I used VLOOKUP to put categories next to titles and then used pivot table to present the data in the way you wanted (after changing some settings of pivot table and fields). Is that what you need? (some words are in Polish, it doesn't matter).