Hey I'm hoping someone here who's better with computers can help me with some terminology. I have a county who has all of their data up on their website for free---saweet! But,it's not in the most useful format. I've been able to download and convert to Excel, but my problem is that I now have two lists I need to "merge". One list is the delinquent tax last (sans owner information) and one is the name and contact information for the parcel owners. The first list has an ID number for each landowner. The second list also has that ID number. What I wondering is, is there a way to take the two Excel sheets and merge them together and match up the ID numbers to create the list that I need with all of the information? I've been searching the internet, but I can't find what I need. I'm probably using the wrong terminology, or its not something Excel is able to do. Does anyone know? Thanks so much!!!
Yes, I have done this before. There are a couple different ways to get the same result. I would look at setting up a report worksheet, a data worksheet and possible a third data worksheet (depending on how often your data changes). It has been a little while since I last attempted something like this, but I believe I have a couple of copy's of worksheets to get started.
@Bloomfieldks Yes, you can definitely do that, and there are a few ways to do it. What you're trying to do is more innately a database operation, specifically "inner join". You can convert your spreadsheets to tables and use SQL to do an inner join on the parcel id field of the two tables. If you have Excel, then I'm guess you have Microsoft Access, which you can use to convert the spreadsheets to tables and do the inner join operation (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/inner-join-operation-b9e73ab6-884a-403e-9f22-cb502feae36a).
You can also do similar things with Excel, but it's a bit less straightforward. You can use the vlookup function, and use one of the spreadsheets as the lookup table. You can hack together a pivot table that gets records from each spreadsheet. You can even do super-clunky things like append one spreadsheet to the other and sort by parcel id, and then use complicated formulas like [simplified for clarity] "if this cell and that cell match, then grab values from this relative address". I wouldn't recommend that last one lol. The point is that there are several ways to achieve what you want. If you're going to be doing this a lot, then you should probably opt for a solution that's more repeatable and less cumbersome.
@LZ9495 @oranjoose Thanks for the info! I'll have to keep working on it and see if I can figure it out.
@Bloomfieldks Do both spreadsheets (tax and property/owner info) have the same number of rows? Or could you manipulate them to have the same number of rows with some reasonable effort? If so, since they both have the same ID number field, you could sort all of the rows by that number, alpha-numerically, on both sheets, and then copy the columns from one of the sheets onto the other. Depending on the number of records/rows, if the one list has a very different number than the other, this approach might not be practical.
@dl7573 I honestly gave up for a couple of days. I'm not super techy, lol and I'm pretty busy with my 9-5 this week. I am going to re-visit the problem this weekend. The spreadsheets have very different number of rows--one is all of the property owners in the County and one is just the delinquent accounts. I could possibly manipulate the number of columns to be the same.
@Bloomfieldks I totally get it. I don't know how practical this might be, depending on the number of accounts on the delinquent list, but you could possibly use Excel's sort feature on both lists to list them both in the same order by parcel ID, then use the Filter feature on parcel ID column within the full property owners list to only show those properties that are on the delinquent list (hiding all others), then if you can confirm they both show the same properties in the same order, you can copy/paste the columns you want to add from one to the other. If you're not familiar with the Filter feature in Excel, you might find some examples of what I mean from some Google or YouTube searches. It's not too difficult in terms of being technical to figure out, but the worst part, which might become impractical if you have hundreds of delinquent properties, would be having to manually check off each of the properties you want to show, one by one, in the Filter drop-down. If it's going to be too tedious, you might find someone on Upwork or Fiverr to combine the fields you need, pretty inexpensively.
@dl7573 I love the idea of just hiring this out, lol. I'm one of those do-it-yourself people, but have precious little time to keep things moving and I think I may be wasting too much of it trying to figure this problem out. Thanks for your help!
I can help. I've been known to do some very clever things in excel.
email it to [email protected] and I'll have a look.
-Cory
@Cory Hey thanks! I actually just saw this message--I've already paid someone from Fivver to help me out. I appreciate the offer, though!