Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tycho01 3953 days ago
The so-so way: use MATCH in one column to get the row numbers, INDEX in one column for each column you want to pull in to actually grab them using that row number. Alternative: join the tables using Power Query so you could have it refresh and give you the combined version even after adding more columns.

I mean, point taken, but in case you were wondering, then yeah. VBA also does SQL operations on Excel tables, but that's, well, worse.
1 comments
mistermann 3952 days ago
> VBA also does SQL operations on Excel tables, but that's, well, worse.

Are you sure about that? Afaik it doesn't but I may be mistaken.

link
tycho01 3952 days ago
Yeah, it could be done using the ADODB interface on data in the workbook itself rather than from some actual DB. See this link for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/a/26678696/1502035 That being said, when I encountered someone doing this I was pretty surprised as well.
link
mistermann 3951 days ago
Pretty wild - it would be nice if MS would put a little effort into their cash cows now and then so people wouldn't have to resort to such things though.
link