Johnathan,

I was just going to post again to correct myself and address this issue.
Enter the values for A1:A4 as follows...

P???N
P1???
P2???
C???4

And for your other examples, the values would be entered as follows...

P?2??5
P??2?5

....and I would change the formula to the following...

=INDEX(B1:B4,MATCH(TRUE,ISNUMBER(MATCH(A1:A4,D1,0) ),0))

....confirmed with CONTROL+SHIFT+ENTER. Otherwise, the previous formula
would return a match even if there were other characters before or after
your text value.

Hope this helps!

In article ,
Jonathan May
wrote:

Humm, interesting - I have other strings of 3 and 4 characters but I'm
using Len() to look at the appropriate list.

Is there any way of doing the "indexed matched search" so that you
could ensure you're only looking at, say, characters 1, 3, and 6, e.g.
so that P*2**5, would give a distinct value from P**2*5?

Luckly only the left and right ends of my string change so (at the
moment) this case doesn't apply and I'm not desperate for an answer :)


Thanks again!