Pull matching data

[Guest]

I have two excel speadsheets. One with names and ID numbers. The other just
has some of the names in the first datasheet. The second speadsheet needs to
be updated with the ID numbers that corespond with the names in the first
spreadsheet. Is there a way of matching the names from the second sheet with
the first sheet and transferring the ID numbers from the first sheet to the
second sheet in one fell swoop without having to do it by hand? (There are
over 250 of them!)

Thanks for the assistance in advance.

 

[Guest]

Yes. Consider using VLOOKUP.

 

[Guest]

And how exactly do I do that? I'm not very familiar with excel. I'm
guessing that I select the column of names in the second workbook and type in
=VLOOKUP(?) but then I don't know what to put in the bracets to get it to
look up the ID numbers from the first workbook and match them according to
the names.

 

[Dave Peterson]

Debra Dalgleish has some notes:
http://www.contextures.com/xlFunctions02.html (for =vlookup())