Broken brain! Can you help?

Hi guys,

As a relative newbie to excel I've been trying to solve a referencing problem for days and I'd be hugely grateful to anyone who can solve my headache!

I have an excel workbook with several tabs, each tab contains a list of students and multiple columns of corresponding data relating to their performance. The data comes from several independent reports which are generated separately, which I have exported and pasted into each of the tabs on my workbook.

I want to generate a new "combined" spreadsheet listing the students and referencing columns which I can pick and chose form several of the different reports on each tab.

I started by filtering them alphabetically, which would have made things really easy if every report had exactly the same number of students. The tricky part is that not all students feature on all the report lists, so I need to first look up and find them across all the tabs, and then populate my new spreadsheet with the corresponding data from columns I select.

It must be possible, I just don't know how! Can anyone help?