jheby wrote...
I am pulling log entries into Excel from Essbase, a multi-dimensional
database, and want to assign categories to each entry using a vlookup. The
entries could use pretty much any character. Below is a sample of a large
string entry:
....

There are tasks for which Excel is most definitely not the most
appropriate tool, and in this case, Excel may be one of the worst tools
for the task. Most scripting languages (Perl, Pyton, Ruby, gawk)
provide associative arrays that handle hashing arbitrarily long
strings. But if you want a simple spreadsheet approach, get a capable
spreadsheet like the one in OpenOffice. OpenOffice Calc doesn't choke
on string operations with string lengths 256 characters. This is one
of the ugly little backwaters of Excel functionality that hasn't been
changed in more than a decade.