I need some guidance on a starting point for a project that I want to do for work to help streamline a repeating process.

I have a set of data that I've been compiling (in Excel for now) that has a medication ingredient name and it's associated ID number for one of our internal programs. (i.e.: Starch | 1001 00)

I'd like to be able to cut and paste a list of ingredients (either one by one or a group of them which are seperated by commas) into a search field (find?), run the function and/or process I've created, and then end up with just those particular entries displayed somehow (which I would then be able to reference to enter into the other system).

Is this something that can be done in Excel or Access? If not, any ideas?



Thanks in advance.

Hi,

Yes, both Excel and Access can do this quite nicely. If you have a lot of data or you are more familiar with Access, then it would be worth putting it into Access. Access can return the results by using a simple query against the table.

If you're going to do it in Excel then putting each ingredient into it's own cell (rather than comma separated) would make things much easier. To return a list of associated IDs you could use the Advanced Filter (manually). If you want to automate the Advanced Filter then you would need to write some VBA code.

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Colin

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