Hi all, I represent a company that is trying to simplify and automate the production of documents relating to hazard identification and risk assessment.

As an example, a typical risk assessment would consist of tabulated text, with columns such as: "Hazards", "Possible Parties At Risk", "Is Risk Controlled?", "Mitigating Steps" etc. and then rows for each particular hazard.

Our idea of automation considers a master library of ALL possible hazards, and the associated data fields placed in one sheet, for example, simply called "DATA".

The idea is that the user can then select the hazard on one single work sheet by placing a specific character, like a tick mark, in a second sheet -"HAZARDS" with a list of the hazards. The third sheet, the actual document to be produced itself, will then check to see which hazards have a tick mark next to them in "HAZARDS", and then automatically call the associated data for all the other columns to build that particular entry.

As an example, if there was a fire risk present, the user would simply put a tick next to "fire risk" in HAZARDS, and excel would search "DATA" for the data for the other columns. It would then insert these other entries for those columns such as "parties at risk", "mitigating steps", etc.

Hopefully, this clarifies the objective of the exercise a little, although please feel free to ask for further clarification - I know that it must sound a bit cumbersome at the moment, but the idea seems simple enough.

However, I have no idea how to go about actually making such a sheet. Of course, the data sheet is easy to create, but can anyone point me in the right direction to learning how to program the capability to look up a specific entry? Would I need to learn VBA/Macro Editing for this?

Thanks in advance.