"Hi,
I am making a database in MS excel of people that are members of my club that are contributing money to the club, now there are few 100 members and they are constantly making contributions, now when anyone makes a contribution I do not want to have to enter all his personal info (which includes Last name, First name, Home phone number and Cell number), instead I want to enter all of them one time somewhere on the spreadsheet and set up that whenever I put in (lets say) the Acronym of the person in column A I should automatically get Last name in column B, First name in column C, Home phone number in column D, Cell number in column E, and then I just have to enter the amount that the person contributed in column F.

Please let me know if there is a way to do so.
Thanks"

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Answer from Richard Rost:

This is EXACTLY why you should use a DATABASE like Microsoft Access instead of a spreadsheet like Excel. In Access you can have two tables: one for your contributors, and another for their contributions. Then you can RELATE the two of them together so you only need to enter the contributor information ONCE and link it to their contributions.

However…

If you really want to do this in Excel, just make Sheet1 for your contributors and assign each of them an ID of some kind… like their first initial and the first 4 letters of their last name.

Now on Sheet2, list their contributions and make sure to include that ID that you created for each person on Sheet1.

Then you could use the VLOOKUP function to pull the rest of their data from Sheet1 into Sheet2 if you must. I'll include a tutorial (below) for you on VLOOKUP.

However, again, Excel really isn't designed for this. I would strongly recommend learning how to build a simple database in Access (if you have it available) if you need to track this kind of information.

You can use the VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP function.

VLOOKUP is a powerful function in Microsoft Excel that allows you to look up a value from another spreadsheet - or a smaller subtable (lookup table).

See this FREE tutorial for help with VLOOKUP:

http://599cd.com/tips/excel/vlookup/?key=BlFAlEx