How do I retain old data after importing?

[Guest]

Working with Excel 2003. We are using Excel to maintain our company
production schedule. We also maintain notes specific to each line item
(i.e.: talked to so and so on date and advised them of early delivery, etc.).
The data is entered into our company software (for financials) and then
"dumped" out to a db file and then imported (filtered and sorted) into Excel.
How do we retain the "notes" specific to each line item?

 

[Dave Peterson]

If it's at all possible, talk to your IT folks to see if you can get that Notes
field added to your real database (and dumped to excel when you need it). It'll
make your life much easier.

But maybe you could create another workbook with a single worksheet.

In column A, you'll have the unique line item ID. In column B, you can add your
specific notes.

Then you can add insert a new column in the "dumped" file that uses an
=vlookup() formula to retrieve these notes.

You may want to read Debra Dalgleish's notes:
http://www.contextures.com/xlFunctions02.html

But keeping all your data in the database will really make things easier.
(Yeah, I understand. If you could get it added in a reasonable amount of time,
you would have done it already.)

 

[Guest]

Thanks Dave. We had thought about that but our programmer is not quite up to
snuff on that (he's still writing code in DOS environment and masking the
input screen to appear like Windows). There is no field in our system that
allows for text data entry. We do not have an IT department either.

The vlookup seems to be the way to go.

Thanks again for the quick response.

Alan