VBA code or excel function to automate to-do list

[quapple]

Hi I'm not sure if this is possible but I'll explain the situation and if anyone has tips/tricks or advice on how to move forward I would greatly appreciate it:

At work we have an excel document where to take meeting minutes and all of this text data is kept in a table.
In order to help keep track of every team members deliverables I would like to be able to search through this table, look for tasks assigned to a specific employee and populate a separate table with this employees assigned tasks, essentially creating a mini to do list for the employee.

I was thinking of using vlookup where I use it to look for where ever the employees name appears in the table however I need it to be able to return a string of text. If I made sure that everyone wrote their meeting notes in the format of "NAME to ____." where we always start the sentence with their name and always end it with a period would this allow for easy vlookup application to spit out a table full of the tasks assigned to the employee?

let me know if this is not clear at all

Kind regards

 

[Dan_W]

I think your proposed method is possible, but I think it would take a lot of unnecessary effort on your part. Instead, I would suggest just putting the key information in separate cells (as below). Structuring the data from the outset will make it easier for you to deal with it later. It would also make it easier to identify individuals and their tasks with VLOOKUP. If you later decide that you nonetheless want to have information listed in narrative form (as per your screen capture), you can pull together a formula like the one I have in the example below to then reproduce it into a full sentence.

Find Movies with Speech.xlsm
	D	E	F	G	H
3	Name	Task	Due Date
4	Jack	Leave	5/23		Jack to leave by 5/23
5	Lana	Provide support	5/25		Lana to provide support by 5/25
6	Jack	Return	5/23		Jack to return by 5/23
7	Lana	provide chocolate	5/25		Lana to provide chocolate by 5/25
Sheet1

Cell Formulas
Range	Formula
H4:H7	H4	=D4&" to "&LOWER(E4)&" by "&TEXT(F4,"m/dd")

I hope that makes sense.

 

[Dan_W]

Hi @quapple - did this meet your needs? If not, do let me know and I'll take another crack at it.