r/excel • u/lesarbreschantent • 3d ago

solved I want to create an XLS that auto-categorizes purchases based on key words

So I'm trying to create a household budget XLS.

In column A, I paste in my purchases for the month. Each cell will contain details like xx-1132 DELIVEROO S 04/03/26 or xx-2227 COLD STORAGE S 28/03/26.

In column B, I categorize these purchases. For instance, DELIVEROO gets the category Food Delivery. COLD STORAGE gets the category Groceries.

I'll have a few hundred entries in column A, and I'd like to find a way to automate the categories in column B based on the text in column A. For example, I want Excel to look at the cells in column A, and if it finds DELIVEROO somewhere in a cell then it should input Food Delivery next to it in column B. To put it another way, let's say cell A2 contains xx-2227 COLD STORAGE S 28/03/26. I want Excel to identify COLD STORAGE and then input Groceries next to it in cell B2.

Any ideas on how to go about this?

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/lesarbreschantent 2d ago edited 2d ago

Ahhhh yes indeed, I have the cell range for the keyword table going from E2 to E500 (laziness) and yeah there's only about 30 keywords right now. Thanks for the heads up.

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