Anyone amazing at excel?!

[Colourmehappy26]

I’ve been trying to google this but to no avail..

I have spreadsheet A which is a list of names and a corresponding dates in separate columns, and then spreadsheet B which is an updated list of names and dates (in same format). In B, there will be some new names & dates that aren’t in A, and some names & dates will have been removed. Some of the dates may have also changed slightly.

Is there any way to do something to highlight all the changes between them? Sheet A has lots of highlights and comments which I don’t want to lose, so can’t just swap to use sheet B as new version, I need to be able to add the new changes into sheet A.
Otherwise I’m going to have to go through manually line by line and compare, and there’s hundreds of rows!

Thank you!

Two separate spreadsheets or two tabs in the same spreadsheet?

Here is a link to a tutorial showing multiple ways to do this depending on the data you are comparing. Hopefully one of the methods works for you.

I would use a vlookup in each of them - anything that says "NA" isn't in the other one.

Tutorials on vlookups should be plenty but make sure you use an exact match (FALSE at the end) and make sure you fix the lookup area to cover the whole area at the beginning or it sometimes drags down which can screw it up.

PS in future if you have the opportunity to give each item a unique reference number that will make stuff like this easier.