Thank you Ron, and JulieD
I took advice from both of your posts, JulieD by removing the
concatenate, and Ron Rosenfeld and JulieD by reconfiguring the lookup
table. It's behaving now. It's nice to have smart people help.

Thank you both.

Pete
On Feb 9, 7:08*am, Ron Rosenfeld wrote:
On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 14:55:56 -0800 (PST), Pete wrote:
Am using this formula in B2 to extract the 2nd and 3rd characters in a
string:

=IF(A2="","",CONCATENATE(MID($A2,2,1),MID($A2,3,1 )))

It correctly displays a "09"

Would like to do a VLOOKUP against the result displayed as "09" (zero
9) and return another value.

How should the table contain the desired matching value?
If I place a 09 in the first column, it's displayed as a 9 and it will
not be found. *Changing to TEXT, and pasting as values doesn't work.
If I place "value" before the formula in B2, it will display as a 9,
and increasing the decimal will display as "9.0".

The text string in A1 looks like 609250412-PL.

So how would I configure the first column in the lookup table to
return a value where the source value is the result of a concatenated
formula?

TIA for any ideas.
Pete

If the first column in the lookup table, and the 2nd and 3rd characters in A2 will always be numbers, then you have several options.

You can enter the values in column 1 of your lookup table as numbers, and convert the formula to a number:
e.g:

=VLOOKUP(IF(A2="","",--MID(A2,2,2)),lookup_table,column_number,FALSE)

If either of those values might be text, then the values in column 1 of the lookup table must also be text. *Numbers can be entered as text either by formatting the cell as text BEFORE entering the *09, *or by preceding the 09 with a single quote (which wil not show in the cell: *'09 *)- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -