Try adding the "FALSE" option to your VLOOKUP formulas, as...

=VLOOKUP(A1,MyRange,2,FALSE)

hth
Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3



"Sharon A" wrote:

When using formulas such as VLOOKUP or SUMIF on a spreadsheet we assume has
been exported from an Access database Excel only seems to read so many
characters of the data it is doing the look up on so even though codes are
unique the first few character may be the same so we are not getting true
results.

Is there a way around this? We have tried copying & pasting as values etc
with no effect

Thanks