QUESTION: I have an excel document that I am working on and need to figure out how to work out the following scenario....I have several tabs with different information that I need to have communicate with each other.  Tab A includes a list of all people who have attended a health fair.  Tab B includes a list of all people who have attended a seminar.  I need to be able to see if any people who attended the health fair also attended the seminar without having to flip back and forth between tab A and tab B.  Is there a way that I can get tab A (or a new tab if necessary) to recognize if John Doe attended both events and in turn compile the data from both?

ANSWER: There are a few functions you could use to see if an item in one column appears in another column.

For example, you could use the MATCH function to see if the value in column A1 appears anywhere in column C:

=MATCH(A1,C:C,0)

If it appears, you'll get a number (indicating which postion the value is in). Otherwise, you'll get an error (which you could supress with the IFERROR function).

Hope this helps.

Let me know if you have any other questions or comments.

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---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: What if the values I am trying to match are in two separate tabs? And then if the same information exists in both tabs then I need it to transmit a date from the second tab into the first tab. How would I do that?

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Answer from Richard Rost:

You can refer to a value in a different tab like this:

=Sheet2!A5

That will give you the value in cell A5 on Sheet2.