Changing reference dates to match with the main table.

[Siddhant_11]

Hi All,

I have 2 excels, a main excel named "Dates" which contains 20 random dates from January and a reference excel named "reference" which contains 5 dates from January. I have to match both the tables, find all dates of reference table in the main table and if any date is not found, reduce value of date by 1 and find again in the main table and repeat the process until a match is found of the date in the main table.

In the end, all dates of reference table should have its entry present in the main table. It will be extremely helpful if you guys could give in your inputs to help me solve the same. I have attached a picture indicating how the inputs as well as the output file should look like below.

Note- This is just a sample data set and the real data set has hundreds of entries so doing it manually takes way too much time.

Thanks in advance.

[TheOC]

hey @Siddhant_11 

Sounds like a job for an iterative macro!

You can find out about these here:
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Getting-Started-with-Iterative-Macr...

I would recommend going through the learning for it, and understanding what it is before building one for your use-case.

Hope this helps,
TheOC

[Qiu · Accepted solution]

@Siddhant_11 
Maybe we dont need the macro.

[Siddhant_11]

Hi @Qiu, this solution most definitely does the job and is even more simplified in comparison to the one I was trying to implement. Thank you for your help.

[atcodedog05 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Siddhant_11 

Here is another method. This method will be more performance-optimized.

Hope this helps : )

[atcodedog05]

And guess I was slow 😅

@Siddhant_11 Please take a look into this also 🙂

[Siddhant_11 · Accepted solution]

Even though appropriate solutions have already been posted, I was able to overcome the bottleneck I was facing while earlier solving the problem. Therefore, I am sharing an alternate solution just to give better insights to anyone facing a similar problem. Thank you once again for your help.

[atcodedog05]

Interesting will definitely give a look @Siddhant_11 🙂👍