Any excel wiz here? Urgent

[Anudawan]

Sorry posting for traffic.

ive got a huge task of moving over 2000 inputs from one file to another, they have variable in puts, and the two file table designs do not match one another.

tell me there is another way than having to literally type out over 2000 lines of data?

It might be worth starting a new file and transfer the information with the VLOOKUP function using one common denominator for the lookup.

Can you not just copy and paste the cells but keep the source formatting when you paste into the new file?

Google the question, I do that for Excel and usually get a good/useful answer

It's impossible to say really without more detail. What do you mean by the file table designs don't match?

Is it that you've got say, name dob address in one file but second file wants first name postcode year of birth or something like that that's stopping you from being able to just copy and paste the columns across? It's absolutely doable but I don't think anyone can advise you without more detail

I'm very old school but I'd probably export the data to some kind of delimited file and then re-import it into the desired structure mapping the fields accordingly. I'm aware this is probably quite a clunky way to do it though! And depends on the structure of the data and whether you can find a unique character to export/import reliably.

As in the input field names are totally different

I tried but I’m not entirely sure what I should be searching, I’d share the file or what I need to do in more specific detail but as it’s work related I can’t

Look ups or pivot tables can help you re organise data to them merge but really depends in what format the 2 data sets are in what the common fields are in

Could you copy and paste each column in the correct place rather than rows?

Can you mock up what you are trying to do and just use made up data, headings, data fields and take a photo?

Maybe then you can get a general idea of what you need to specifically Google / you tube videos etc

If the data needs to go from rows to columns you can copy paste transpose

Really hard to understand what u want to do and what it looks like.now

There are no common field names

The data is cut differently so for instance

and this is a hypothetical

source data says number of fish 1-7, 8-10 and 10+ but the desired field has it labelled as minimum amount of fish and then maximum amount of fish

Can you use Excel Power query to import tge data but assign new names to the column headers?

Ask chatgpt. That’s what I do for all my excel queries now

I don’t know how to do that?

So are you saying you want to take for example a row in one spreadsheet that has a column for number of fish and an entry of 8, and put that into a different spreadsheet which instead groups the number of fish into categories - so in this case you need to put it in the “5-10” category?

If you need to ask this question, you won’t be able to work with power queries!

The most basic thing is work column by column if one column is the same as another in terms of data content but called something else. Leave column headers in place, copy and paste data column by column underneath the new columns.

If there are no common fields then how do you propose to do it manually ?

In which case you can probably use the if function to organise the data under the new headings.

You could create a column that has all possible number of fishes

And then there is an if command to fill in the rows

So if( a1> 10, b3 ... )

Nesting if is a bit nasty but gets there

can you upload 2 dummy data files so we can give some tips?

That’s was my backup plan and then it should be easier to just copy across

Oh now I feel stupid

Ask ChatGPT how to do it

Chat GPT, you can put the files in there and ask it to sort it out for you.