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Transcripts for the above video clip:
DOUBLE HEADER CHECKS:
When pulling information into your spreadsheet, especially when it
comes from another system, it is always useful to do some sort of a
check to make sure that what you are receiving is what you expect to
receive. One way of doing this is to actually include the headers
twice. So in the spreadsheet, manually, we type the headers we
expect to see, & then when we copy/paste from the other system we
include the actual header row, we can now do some checks on these
headers. For the header check, what we want excel to do is compare
what we've input here to what we copied & pasted in. A useful
feature in excel that can help with that is the EXACT function; we
can activate the FUNCTION WIZARD & find the EXACT function. What it
says is it checks whether two text strings are exactly the same, and
returns true or false. It is also case sensitive, which is important
to know. You can specify where the first text is & where the second
text is & when we say ok you'll see we either get a true or a false.
To give us a more meaningful description, we can just build a quick
IF statement based on this indicator here, if I go to the FUNCTION
WIZARD activate IF, and I say IF this cell equals true, if it's true
say "OK" & if it's false say "check", when I say "ok", you get a
cell that gives us a description of what is happening with these
headers. If we want to get fancy, we can put these two cells all
into one formula, & a quick way of doing that is we go to the last
formula, highlight it, copy it, & we push the escape key to get out
of it, go here we push equals, then we paste our formula then push
enter. Now what this is doing is going up, using this cell here, so
we can actually now go take the formula, copy the formula out of
that cell, push escape, come down here, & where the reference is
made to the cell D6, we just replace it with what we've just copied,
then we push ok. You'll see we have a single cell formula that
handles both those situations. Now lets copy these across to all our
headers & what you'll see if we quiclky look across, is that right
at the end here we've got a problem cell & what we see what we were
expecting for this column was the date & what we got is some other
header. This can cause problems later down in our spreadsheet where
perhaps we have formula that rely on this column being the date.
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