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Thu 9 May, 2013 03:48 pm
Hello,
I have to do an analysis on an online membership database within excel, but for some reason, some of the cells under the Gender column remain unfilled. Instead of manually filling each cell in, I would like to be able to do it automatically, where a code checks male and female naming dictionary and, if the first name of the member matches a male entry in the dictionary, to enter “Male” or “Female” in the corresponding cell (and if the code can’t find the name to leave it blank – I would elect to do this instead of using, say, the male dictionary and making all names that can’t be found female because some of the names are foreign and probably can’t be found in the dictionary) I do not have any coding experience, so if I could get guidance of some kind (a viable programming language for this task, general outline of the code, how to search multiple web pages, etc) before starting this project, I would highly appreciate it!
@abikau93,
It's probably going to involve a lookup table, but it is not going to be useful. There are simply too many ambiguous names. Dale comes to mind. Is Dale a male name, or female. Often, wrong information is worse than no information.
@abikau93,
You don't have to use code, just a lookup table as mentioned above and a conditional statement in the cell. Something like:
IF(LOOKUP("Suzy", FEMALE_NAMES)="Suzy", "FEMALE", IF(LOOKUP("Suzy", MALE_NAMES)="Suzy", "MALE",""))