A lot of people try to use Excel as a database A lot of people try to use Excel as a database. While it can work as a database, some of the tasks that would be very easy in a database program are fairly complex in Excel. One of these tasks is matching two lists based on a common field.

Say that your travel agency sends you a month end report of all the places that your employees have traveled. The report uses airport codes instead of city names. It would be helpful if you could easily put in the real city name instead of just the code.

On the Internet, you find and import a list showing the city name for each airport code.

The following table lists the three-letter IATA codes for some of the major airports in Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and a small number of other countries. These codes are used by airlines and travel agents. They appear in some airline timetables. They are also used, most importantly, on the baggage tags applied to each item of checked baggage (luggage handed over to the airline when you check in at an airport, for transportation in the plane's baggage hold). It is always worth making sure that your cases receive tags with the correct airport code.

Some airport codes are obvious (for example AMS = Amsterdam), some obscure (for example IAD = Dulles, Washington DC, perhaps derived from International Airport Dulles), and some completely meaningless (for example many of the Canadian airport codes). I seem to remember reading somewhere that at one time a scheme was proposed to use a prefix to indicate the airport's country and the Canadian codes were allocated on that basis. However, the scheme was then discontinued for some reason.

1 Use the VLOOKUP function. But, how do you get this information on each record in the report? 1 Use the VLOOKUP function. VLOOKUP stands for “Vertical Lookup”. It can be used anytime that you have a list of data with the key field in the left-most column.