It depends on your strings, and how similar they are. Anything from a simple =LEFT(A1,255) to a
more colplicated sampling every third (or fourth or thenth) letter could work....

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP


"jheby" wrote in message
...
Excel vlookup function returns #VALUE when the lookup value exceeds 256
characters. I need a hash function to transform large strings into a value
that does not exceed the 256 character limit. Are there any quick solutions
to this problem?