Need to Pull Data from Second Sheet using Part of Cell on First Sheet - excel

Question

I am manipulating data created by another program and saved into Excel, and that data is NOT consistent in the way that some things are abbreviated, nor on the spacing in some of the cells. This site has helped a lot with pulling out some of the data, but this one has me stumped. If it's already been answered, please point me to that answer, as I couldn't find it. :)
I have a "reference" worksheet (that stays hidden) where the first column is possible abbreviations, and the second column is the value that needs to be returned. The reference sheet might show: (cells seperated by //, rows separated by \: Apple//Apple\ Apple//Apple\ Banana//Banana\ Ban//Banana\ Org//Orange\ Orange//Orange)
The created/imported data might include 4 cells that look like this (cells separated by //: 1234 - Apple - Cut and serve //Sometimes 836 Banana Raw//Org Peel // 730-Orange-Juice):
I need to pull out the name of the fruit referenced in each. Effectively, what I need is the row (on the reference sheet) where the contents of the cell in the first column are included in the data imported. Then, I can use a lookup to pull the value from the cell in the second column of that row.
So, in my sample data, the formula would return:
2
3
5
6
I hope that is clearly explained. Oh, and I can only use formulas, no programming of any sort.
Thanks for any direction you can give.

Answer 1

In my opinion there is no way for do this with a formula if you import the data as you show because you can't do a "search" for each "substring" (or word) contained in a cell comparing it with a list of other substrings.
Otherwise if you import the data of the "created/imported" sheet specifyng as cell-separator the space " " and as row separator the "//" you will have a single word for each cell, like
A | B | C | D | E | F | G |
1234 - apple - cut and serve
sometimes 836 banana raw
org peel
730 orange juice
here you can use the VLOOKUP for every cell of the columns formed with the import for search the word in the "reference" sheet, so use the same amount of cols (in this case 7) and for each cell of the cols do the VLOOKUP for the corresponding cell (A to G in the example) and find your friut, with something like this
=VLOOKUP(A1;'[Worksheet_reference.xlsx]sheet_reference'!$A$1:$A$100;2;FALSE)
you can obtain something like
AA | AB | AC | AD | AE | AF | AG |
N/A N/A apple N/A N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A banana N/A
orange N/A
N/A orange N/A
you can add an IF with an ISNA for detect the N/A values and write something else instead of them, for example
=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(A1;'[Worksheet_reference.xlsx]sheet_reference'!$A$1:$A$100;2;FALSE));"";VLOOKUP(A1;'[Worksheet_reference.xlsx]sheet_reference'!$A$1:$A$100;2;FALSE))
for return "" instead of N/A, and then you can concatenate the results (you said there is only one friut for each row) all the rows for have the result in one single row, like in cell AF
=AA&AB&AC&AD&AE&AF&AE
you will obtain only the friuts...
This is not so "clean", but it's the only way i can imagine ;)
Ettore