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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The other commenters have the right of it.

Excel/google have VLOOKUP(). You give it a sorted list and a value to compare. Then it tells you what was next to that in the table. So if you have a column for gear names and a column for weights, then you can look up weights by name.

I’ll break down an example based on @bleep. Say you have a single sheet with your packing list (column A), gear names (C), and gear weights (D).

To fill column B with packed weights, instead of putting in values, use something like

=VLOOKUP(A2, C$2:D$50, 2, false)

In space B2. Then it will look for something matching A2 in the cells from C2 to C50. It’ll take the 2nd value from whatever row it matched, and since we told it C2:D50, that means it’ll give a value from column D. Copy it to the rest of B. You can then sum and pie chart column B just as you do now.

Bleep’s example lets you move the gear info to different sheets and split up the list. That’s a matter of preference.