[Technic] Excel help

[Scott Mayo]

Lori Kempker wrote:
>  Any Excel guru's out there that might be able to help with a Lookup 
> function?  I have a list of student names and the student number on one 
> spreadsheet.  I will have many spreadsheets with just student names on them 
> and I would like to insert a formula to look up the student number and 
> insert it in the second spreadsheet.  I am having to do this in our 
> conversion from Lemco to PowerSchool.  We did not have a local student 
> number in Lemco, only a social and MOSIS.  We created a Spreadsheet with all 
> the student names and a 4 digit number.  As I print class rosters to file, I 
> need to get the student number on the class roster spreadsheet in order to 
> put it into PS.  Is this possible using a lookup function?
> 
> Thanks for any help.  I won't be able to try this until Thursday so if you 
> can't reply until then, I'll still take all the help I can get.

Lori,
   You can have Openoffice access the external file with the file:/// 
command.  Here is an example.  I have a file named c:\names.ods that 
contains:
scott 1
daren 2
loren 3
The names are in A1-A3 and the numbers are in B1-B3

Now I create a new spreadsheet.
The cell A1 in the new spreadsheet will contain "scott";
Now I can add the following formula to B1.

=LOOKUP(A1;'file:///c:/names.ods'#$sheet1.A1:A3;'file:///c:/names.ods'#$sheet1.B1:B3)

The value in B1 will be 1.  The lookup command looks up what is in A1 on 
the current sheet and it looks it up in the saved file c:\names.ods.

If I change A1 to daren then B1 would contain 2.

I am sure that excel will access the external spreadsheet files also, 
but I don't know how to tell you to access it with excel so just use 
Openoffice. :)

I am not sure how familiar that you are with the lookup commands so I 
will send you a small presentation that I gave to a few of my teachers 
last year for some examples.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Scott Mayo
System Administrator
Bloomfield Schools
PH: 573-568-5669
FA: 573-568-4565
Pager: 800-264-2535 X2549

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