I have spent all day playing with this problem that seems so simple and need some new ideas!

Background: I have a workbook with multiple worksheets. One master worksheet has all employees name, employee number etc. This information is then linked to other worksheets in the same document to avoid typing it in again in the other sheets. In the other worksheets people fill different types of data beside the corresponding employee.

Problem: Everything above works perfectly however the problem is when a new employee is added. We add it at the bottom of the master sheet and hit the sort button. The employees are all shuffled by name and the master sheet is perfect. The other slave sheets with the names that are linked get sorted as well however the data that was entered beside them is not sorted so the whole sheet is off.

slave sheet:
NAME DATA
adam 1
brian 2
mike 3
paul 4
Adrian 5 ---this is unsorted example of the new employee adrian


when sorted the slave sheet shifts names but not numbers, adrian should be 5 not 2:
NAME DATA
adam 1
Adrian 2
brian 3
mike 4
paul 5


I dont know if this made any sense...but I am at the end of fooling with this and thought i would take any help i could get. I'm taking lunch now, very tired!

 

have you tried grouping the data on the slave sheets?

 

Sounds like you need to switch over to Access. You can import most, if not all, of the records you already have.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying you NEED to switch. Just that I'd look into it. There may be a simple solution to your problem.

 

Is it just sorting the first column? If so. you need to select the whole spread sheet and then sort and it'll group it all correctly

 

vlookup?

 

That's what I thought, but he said the parent sheet sorted just fine. It's the records in the child sheet that are mixing up.

I don't know. It would take all of 30 minutes to design an Access database, especially if you have the structure already pegged.

 

Do some research on excel concat & count

Good Luck

 

Agreed. It looks very clear that the sort on the first page encompasses all the correct columns and the slave sheets don't.

If you're doing it manually, make sure the entire data set is selected. If you've written some macros, then I'd guess your sorting on A:A and not A:C (or D or E or whatever).

 

did you figure it out? i would also think that you need to make sure all of the data is selected or that your sort is working on all columns, and not just the first one.

also, depending on what your "slave sheets" are keeping track of, i would also second the suggestion of moving to a database...whether it be access or something more robust like sql server (they have a free express version now). excel sucks as a database.

 

moving to access is probably overkill for this situation, excel is a lot more user friendly, and i think learning excel is the easiest solution.