Thanks for your reply.

Vlookup can only search the leftmost column of a range-- In that case,
if i only want to search the leftmost column, can I do this?

Example.

I want to search "abc"

Data

A B C D E
1 abcde fghij klmno pqrst uvwxy

2 fghij klmno pqrst uvwxy abcde

3 klmno pqrst uvwxy pqrst uvwxy

4 edabc fghij klmno pqrst uvwxy