James Chen: Use Consistent Sheet Names

March 27, 2012 - by Bill Jelen

James Chen sends along this guest post. James is a member of the Excel Gurus group at LinkedIn.

More often than not we need to pull info from various worksheets in a workbook. If you use care to consistently name the worksheets, you can combine VLOOKUP with INDIRECT to pull data from different worksheets. This technique is a life and time saver.

Let’s say you have a sales sheet with various customers and you get a new worksheet every month. Be consistent in choosing a naming rule for the worksheets. For example, you could use Sales_Jan_2012, Sales_Feb_2012, Sales_Mar_2012. This is what I like to call uniform naming.

On a summary sheet, you want to lookup sales for customer XYZ from each monthly sheet. Say that you have true Excel dates for Jan 2012, Feb 2012, Mar 2012 in B3:D3. You have the customer name in A4. The structure of each monthly sales sheet is customer in A and sales in B. Try this formula:

=VLOOKUP($A4,INDIRECT(“Sales_”&TEXT(B$3,”MMM_YYYY”)&”!$A:$B),2,False)

How it works: the TEXT function formats the date in the format of Jan_2012. The ampersand is a concatenation operator, so you end up passing Sales_Jan_2012!$A:$B to the INDIRECT function. The function will dynamically look at a different worksheet based on the date in row 3.

This is especially useful when you have multiples upon multiples of uniform source data sheets that you need to pull from.