You could try the left(), mid() and right functions to extract the data to
what you want?

Not sure if this will work in a VLOOKUP as I've never tried it, but you
could create a cell at the end of you range which holds the data you're
searching through.

Hope this helps.

"mvyvoda" wrote:

when using VLookup, how can I search not the entire cell but parts of the
cell, that is if I want to search 4 or 5 deep. If I'm comparing, for example:

A = 123456789
B = 1234d56789

VLOOKUP(A,B,1,???) - whereas ???=FALSE to find an exact match I would want
something to search B up to 4 or 5 characters compared to A.

Does this make sense?

Thanks for the help,
-m