How do I search for multiple twitter handles in excel?

[Crazy_Teacher]

I have a massive excel sheet with peoples names, professions and twitter handles. For the events I manage, I often need to find 5 or 6 twitter handles at a time. Butthen I have to do this 20 times. That means I am looking up one by one the twitter handle for a total of over a hundred people. Is there any way to search all the participants at the same time and filter just the twitter handles I want?

[Adama]

You can use vlookup (check out the link in the source).

You'll need to put all of the values (i.e. Twitter handles) in some column, e.g. Col A of Sheet 2. Let's also say that you have the Twitter handles in Sheet 1, Col A and the corresponding names in Col B, like this:

Sheet 1
Col A Col B
@1st FirstPerson
@ 2nd SecondPerson
etc...

Sheet 2
Col A Col B
@2 we'll place our vlookup here

Note that the way vlookup works, you have to have the lookup value (in this example, the handle) in the FIRST column of the range of cells you'll select when you build your formula out. This means that if you actually have names and need their handles, the names need to be in Col A so vlookup can find them.

Going forward with our first example...

The best place to put this formula is usually in a cell adjacent to the value, so we'll say this is going into Col B while our value is in Col A. Your formula will look like this:

=vlookup(A1,Sheet1!A:B,2,false)

Piece by piece, this breaks down like this:

A1: this is the value you are looking up, which is in this example "@2"
Sheet1!A:B: this is the range of cells you are restricting your search to. The value you are searching (@2) must be in the first of these columns, or Col A here.
2: this is the column in the range you selected above that you want returned as a value. So, if you want the name returned and the name is in Col B, since Col B is the second column in the selection, you'll put 2 here
false: searches for an exact match instead of an approximate match. Never use anything other than this, it returns guesses

If your lookup value is not found, you'll get a #N/A error in the cell with the formula.

If you want to read up further, check out the source link below.

Good luck.