Compare two excel sheets

Question

How do I compare two excel sheet and determine which column is missing?

(I would like to compare a list of countries from sheet A with sheet B, then mark which count

Answer 1

The solution varies depending on the number of rows involved and the number of times you need to do this, and how you want the information to be presented.

If you don't have a lot of countries and you need to do this only once, the fastest solution is:

• Copy both columns into a temporary sheet.
• Sort both columns alphabetically.
• Manually go through them and spot the differences.

If you need to do this just once, but there are lots of countries, the vlookup option is the fastest one.

If you need to repeat this procedure lots of times, and you need use that list somewhere (i.e. in other sheet) then you can use a more convoluted solution, involving two additional columns with lookups, and pivot tables. But at that point I'd look at moving it to something more manageable, like a small database.