Automatically Transforming Excel Cells: A Guide

In this post, we’re going to delve into an interesting problem I recently came across while working with Excel databases. In an effort to better organize my data, I wanted to assign unique numerical identifiers to various elements in one column, while keeping this assignment consistent throughout the whole database.

The challenge here was creating automatic population in Column B based on the corresponding elements in Column A. The crucial requirement was that I had more than six diverse elements to consider. Initially, I attempted using the IF function but confronted some roadblocks due to the multiplicity of my elements. Let’s explore this issue and figure out how to gain mastery over it in Excel databases.

Let’s recap that my original database looked like this:

Column A     Column B
Cow          1
Chicken      2
Horse        3
Butterfly    4
Cow          1

I needed these numbers in Column B to be automatically generated based on the specific animal in Column A. At first, I tried a basic IF formula like this =IF(A5="Cow", "1", "False") where “False” is returned if A5 is not equal to “Cow.” Unfortunately, this methodology fell short when I tried to incorporate more elements using multiple arguments, and an error message popped up.

My syntax was =IF(A5="Cow", "1", "False", IF(A5="Chicken", "2", "False")). Rather than defining the various types of elements, this formula was flagged for having too many arguments. But don’t worry, Excel has a neat tool to handle such situations—‘VLOOKUP’.

‘VLOOKUP’ or Vertical Lookup, is a searching method Excel offers where it can lookup for a certain value vertically in a column. It looks for a value in the first column of a table array and returns a value in the same row from another column in the table array.

Let’s create a separate table with our associations; for instance, ‘Cow’ = 1, ‘Chicken’ = 2, etc. Should look something like this:

Animal     Type
Cow         1
Chicken     2
Horse       3
Butterfly   4

Then, in column B, we would use =VLOOKUP(A1, [Range of your new table], 2, False). This will look for the value in ‘A1’ in the first column of our new table, and return the corresponding value from the second column of that same row.

With VLOOKUP, we’re able to input the precise values needed for Column B based on the cell values of Column A. This method bypasses the complications of applying IF function with multiple arguments.

In summation, when tackling various elements in two columns of an Excel database, it may be advantageous to branch out from basic IF formulas and delve into utilizing other functions Excel offers, such as VLOOKUP.