Summary

Let’s quickly recap on what you’ve learned so far: you’ve seen how you can combine several Google Spreadsheets formulas by placing on inside the other, in this case by placing one SUBSTITUTE formula inside another, and then both of this inside a SPLIT formula. The innermost formula runs first and then passes its results to the next formula up that contains it. We could alternatively have used each formula within a new column in turn, with the next formula in the chain working on data from the previous column, but taking such an approach may clutter our spreadsheet needlessly. (Such an approach does, however, show your working at each step, we can be useful if an error ever crops in to your spreadsheet!)

You also learned how to use the VLOOKUP() formula to combine data from two separate sheets that share a column column. It did not matter that the order of the rows was different in the two sheets – the VLOOKUP formula was able to take each cell value from the column in the first sheet and then look up the same value in the second. The value the was returned was the value of a the cell in a specified column from the matched row in the second sheet.