View Single Post
  #3   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
bpeltzer
 
Posts: n/a
Default VLOOKUP error message

My detail would surely help: what are the values that aren't matching?
There are two issues that cause this frequently. First is text that has
extra spaces before or, more commonly, after the visible text. That is
"Apple" is NOT going to match "Apple ". If you're matching text to text, you
might check for this. With the cell selected, click at the END of the
formula bar. If the cursor isn't immediately after the text, you've got
extra spaces. (Do this both in the table and where you're doing the lookup).
You can just delete the extra spaces.
The other common issue is a mismatch between a number and a text
representation of that number. If the table has a string 6 and the lookup
uses the number 6, they won't match. And cell formatting won't get them to
match. Try applying the comma style to both. If they're really both
numbers, you'll get two decimal points; if either is text, the comma style
won't do much. If this is the issue, you can either reenter the data to get
it to be numeric, or use a construct like vlookup(trim(a1)... to convert a
number to a string for the purposes of the lookup or vlookup(value(a1) to
conver a string to a number for the lookup.
HTH. If not, please provide more detail. --Bruce

"Janeen" wrote:

After verifying that the formula is correct, matching cell formats, and
verifying the cell data is an exact match, I continue to get a "N/A" response
in two cells of my workbook. I've even gone so far as to back out of Excel,
re-launch the program, and re-open my source file and VLOOKUP file. Out of
over 1300 matched items, these two refuse to cooperate! Can anyone tell me
why?

I'm frazzled beyond understanding at this point... (sigh)