If you want to "add up all the numbers by a person's initials", don't
use VLOOKUP at all:

=SUMIF(B4:B7,"xx",A4:A7)

Or, to get a list of everyone's sums, use a Pivot Table instead.

In article ,
"greg" wrote:

Hello,
I have a spreadsheet. that has 2 columns A and B
In the A column there are numbers. and in the B column there are people
initials.
the people can be in multiple columns
can i use vlookup to add up all the numbers by a persons initals?
so:

A B
4 xx
5 xx
2 yy
8 xx
7 yy

I see I could do somthing like this
but it is an error
= VLOOKUP("xx", A11:B14, 1, FALSE)

can anyone help?
thanks