Re: Fwd: Need help from an Excel guru

[Tony Chung <tonyc -at- tonychung -dot- ca>]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Lauren <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net> wrote:
> On 12/16/2010 12:26 PM, Tony Chung wrote:
>> I sent this directly to John but it might have gotten trapped in his spam
>> blocker.
>
> You sent it to the list, too, and I am interested in learning how well

Why yes, I guess I did. I didn't think I did that. Oh well.

> this works with John's spreadsheet, since it seems very simple and
> useful, but I am uncertain about how your formula will work.

As I look back, I made an error. The formula should be:

=if(A2="",C1,A2)

It is slightly manual. The main assumption is that Column A holds the
ID for the first entry in Column B of a specific type. If Column A is
not present for a specific Column B item, then Column B must be part
of the same group as the previous item. In this case, Column C would
hold the group value, and would only be referenced if the A cell for
that row is blank.

So, in a table (ignore faulty formatting due to proportionally spaced type:

ID     Desc    Formula
xxxx  Item A  =if(A2="",C1,A2) | A2 is not blank, so display "xxxx"
         Item B  =if(A3="",C2,A3) | A3 is blank, so display C2, which
holds "xxxx")
         Item C  =if(A4="",C3,A4) | A4 is blank, so display C3, which
also holds "xxxx")
yyyy  Item D  =if(A5="",C4,A5) | A5 is not blank, so display "yyyy"

etc...

Serves me for trying to answer questions on my iPhone.

-Tony
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