Please help a MYOB dude... Find values.. group together.

[abrogard]

Excuse my ignorance. I'm so ignorant I couldn't even search to see if my question has already been answered - because I don't know what to call my question.

The thing is I have exported a table from MYOB (a book-keeping package) to Excel format in hopes of doing searches on the data that can't be done within MYOB.

Line by line it shows the purchase of some item.

The columns (excel speak, there) will be like date, supplier, amount, item.

What I want to do is collect like items together.

The item descriptions might not be exactly identical in each instance. So I might have to search for a keyword within that field.

Here's an example of some items:

2gig hard drive
maxtor 20 gig drive
lan card
audio card
old soundblaster card
western digital drive

So you can see that if I want to group all the hard drives and see what I've spent on them by totalling the costs I'd have to search on 'drive' because I've been sloppy on the data input and that's the only common word.

Now I know nothing. But I'm told by one friend that Excel can do this virtually by clicking on menu choices. Another friend tells me that I'll need to write macros.

This looks like a forum of people who really know their Excel. could you guys please point me in the right direction?

 

[Woohoo]

You could use Data-AutoFilter and then select custom on the drop down on the column where you have the items listed. From there you can select "Contains" and type in drive (for example). That will show all the entries containing the word drive.

Quick and dirty.