HELP: Displaying a brand depending on the first 4 letters of a catalog.

[AE]

Hi there.

I really dont use Excel much, I've used only the basic functions but I
would like to make a spreadsheet that depending on a catalog number
that I input I would get the product family it is part of.

for example.

I have 3 Families: Screws, Connectors & Rawstock
each family have a bunch of products, which are represented with a
catalog number.

ie.

abcd001
acdb999
etc...

so, I would like to have 2 columns....

Column A which will be Catalog number and Column B which will be
Product Family.

So I would like to input manually the catalog number and by reading the
first 4 letters from the catalog Excel will display automatically the
product family it belongs to on column B.

each of my product families have almost 20 variations.
I have around 10 or 15 product families, how can I make this work?

what command/function do I need?
Please advice. Thanks in advance.

 

[Guest]

HI AE

In a blank area on one of your sheets create a table with the first 4
letters in the first column and the text you want in the next column. Lets
call the table rangeA. Then in column B of your sheet you can put in a
formula to lookup the value
i.e. in B2 type "=vlookup(Left(A2,4),RangeA,2,false) " then this can be
copied down