Missing column of descriptions in Consolidate Function


Posted by Joan L. on January 03, 2002 11:44 AM

Does anyone have a clue why a column of description would not end up in the consolidated worksheet when using the "Consolidate" function? THANKS

Posted by Chris D on January 03, 2002 2:49 PM

What are your columns ?

might a pivot table be better ?

Chris

Posted by Joan L. on January 04, 2002 7:15 AM

Thanks for the attempt to help! The column is "B". In the first column is the identifying part number. In the second column (B) is the description of the part. All the other columns are related to sales, expenses, unit #s, etc. (Does content matter?)



Posted by Chris D on January 04, 2002 11:11 AM

I think so.....

I've fiddled around a bit with consolidate, and don't like it much - it looks like it only consolidates single descriptions with their related number data

(I'm open to be corrected though !)

so the part number data and part description data in your example messes it up as it's not a single field

for example :

SOCCER TEAM - WINS - DRAWS - LOSSES - POINTS

can be consolidated as there's only 1 descriptive field, the rest are all numeric

whereas :

SOCCER TEAM - LOCATION - WINS - DRAWS - LOSSES - POINTS

can't be as location is not a numeric field

maybe if you concat column A and column B it would work : add a new column C and add the formula =A1&" "&B1 in the first occurance then use this new column C with your numeric data

That's my understanding of it, although I might easily be wrong......

However, a pivot table will give you perfect consolidation of all fields, I'd recommend looking into the use of these - especially retreiving the consolidated data as you can double click on a pivot result to get the raw data nicely filtered for you on a seperate sheet etc

HTH
Chris