Excel Lookup Data Based on Column Name not Cell Name - vba

Question

I am trying to accomplish a strange task in excel and don't know how to go about it. I'm using Excel 2007 at work and I know very basic vba.
I want to automate a process where a person takes three spreadsheets and dumps certain data from them into one master sheet. The three spreadsheets vary every month in their column order, so unfortunately I can't just program vlookups to run and get the data.
I could be wrong, but it seems like Vlookup Match, Index Match Match, etc. wouldn't work either because they are still referencing cells. I basically need something that will find a column based on the text in the column, rather than its location, because the location will change, but the text will always be the same.
I have two ideas but I have no idea if they work and don't really know where to start on implementing them:
Convert the three spreadsheets to tables and reference the headings with table syntax (I haven't been able to get this to work)
Complex VBA that IDs everything
Can anyone help point me in the right direction to accomplish this task? Thanks so much for your help.
EDIT EXAMPLE
My main template that I'm trying to dump things into is just going to have the ID#s and empty columns:
ID# AltID# Deal
1
2
3
4
5
And then another spread sheet might have look like this
ID# AltID# Deal
1 10101 AAAA
2 20202 BBBB
3 30303 CCCC
4 40404 DDDD
5 50505 EEEE
I could of course vlookup, but the problem is next month, those columns in the second spreadsheet won't be in the same place, in the same order. They could be all the way on colum DD or whatever. So I need a formula that looks them up regardless of the columns location. Just matching them by the heading text. I hope that clarifies...

Answer 1

If you combine VLOOKUP with MATCH you can search based on column name, not index. Remember that the MATCH function returns the numeric index of the match. Let's assume that your data looks like the below:
NAME DAY1 DAY2 DAY3
Bob 123 345 567
Tim 456 789 998
A functioning Vlookup to return the DAY2 column for Tim would look like:
=VLOOKUP("Tim", A2:D3,MATCH("DAY2",A1:D1,0),FALSE)
A couple of notes. Where I've hard coded in words, you can use cell references.

Answer 2

Here is one idea:
get the index of the column ID# in Sheet2 MATCH("ID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)
convert to a character: CHAR(MATCH("ID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64)
get the column range:
INDIRECT(
CONCATENATE("Sheet2!",
CHAR(MATCH("ID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64),":",
CHAR(MATCH("ID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64)))
similarly for column AltID#:
INDIRECT(
CONCATENATE("Sheet2!",
CHAR(MATCH("AltID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64),":",
CHAR(MATCH("AltID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64)))
with range of ID# and AltID#, we can do the match+index:
=INDEX(
INDIRECT(
CONCATENATE("Sheet2!",
CHAR(MATCH("AltID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64),":",
CHAR(MATCH("AltID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64))),
MATCH(A2,INDIRECT(
CONCATENATE("Sheet2!",
CHAR(MATCH("ID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64),":",
CHAR(MATCH("ID#",Sheet2!$1:$1,0)+64))),0))

Answer 3

Here is an idea to consider:
Give a name to cell ID# e.g "dataJanuary" and use this named-cell as reference using an OFFSET function then you can explore it with vlookup or index-match function or other method.
Next month even if the ID# column is moved to other column or row, it will always reference to the same data since the cell is already named with "dataJanuary".