Get "latest" version of customer info in Excel

Question

I have three spreadsheets of customer data (name, email, physical address). These sheets each have a date column, representing when the contact was last updated. I need to create one spreadsheet from the three using the most recent contact info from each. The "key" (what I'm using to determine two contacts are the same) is email, but the three sheets don't each have the same customers. An email address might exist in one, two, or all three of the sheets. From whichever one(s) it exists, I need the latest version.

Answer 1

The way I solved this was by first making sure that the columns all matched and were in the same order among the three datasets. Then I combined all the sheets with a simple copy/paste, and then I sorted by the "last modified" date, newest to oldest. Once that was done, a simple "remove duplicates" on the email column removed all duplicate emails, leaving only the first (and, due to the sort, most recent) entry.