Joining worksheets / outer join

[danr_18]

I've found some spreadsheet joining discussion threads, but I haven't
found one which I think is applicable...

Basically, I have 5 worksheets in an Excel file to be used as a mail
merge.

Each worksheet has lists of companies and the industries that they
handle.
Some companies have offices at different addresses, which should remain
as seperate rows.

Some companies handle more than one industry and are thus in more than
one worksheet.
Some of the companies have one business contact for all industries,
some have seperate business contacts.

I want one worksheet, which merges data from the 5 worksheets-- which
has a unique (company/contact/address) per row and all of the related
business industries listed after it, on the same row.

I have added an industry field to each worksheet, in an effort to merge
the spreadsheets into one spreadsheet. At the moment, I do have a
merged spreadsheet, with seperate rows for each industry -- with
duplicates rows when a company handles more than one industry.

I also have a spreadsheet without duplicate rows -- but it doesn't
mention industry.


Suggestions?

Maybe take the spreadsheet without duplicate rows, and then make it
look up the information on the other worksheets? But - can a generic
lookup be done based upon a combined key? (I'm used to databases more
than spreadsheets...)

 

[Earl Kiosterud]

danr,

Excel is a good spreadsheet program, but trying to make a database out of it
just is too much work. If you're used to data base programs, then by all
means do this in one. You can link a sheet into Access (or better yet,
import it and stay with it), then go with it.