Thanks for your replies. I did try 0 in the fourth argument. No good. But I
was checking for spaces and clicked in front of several of the homeroom
values in my table, which caused them to be right-justified instead of left
(thus changing the format?) and the formulas that were working gave values of
#N/A. I left-justified them again and now the entire dtatbase is fine. I have
no idea what I did to clear up the problem, but I all the variations of the
formula that I was trying work now.

"Peo Sjoblom" wrote:

Change the lookup formula to


=VLOOKUP(E2,Range,2,0)

if you still have the same problem and if there are no invisible characters
then there must be numbers involved where one set are seen as number and one
as text, just do this

=ISTEXT(Cell1)

=ISTEXT(Cell2)

where the first one is the lookup value cell and the second one cell in the
table that returns an error

if you get TRUE in one of these (probably the second) copy an empty cell,
select all the room numbers
and do editpaste special and select add




--

Regards,

Peo Sjoblom

http://nwexcelsolutions.com


"amberlodge" wrote in message
...
I just did and could find no extra spaces or blanks. Several names have
the
same homeroom; with some the formula works, with others it doesn't. If I
paste the lookup value that works into the ones that don't, the formula
works. Yet the cells were identical. I tried typing the number in from
scratch and that did not work.

"Ardus Petus" wrote:

Did you check for extra blanks at the end of your values?

HTH
--
AP

"amberlodge" a écrit dans le
message
de ...
Excel 2000

Really simple data sheet: list of names with homerooms
Lookup table: list of homerooms with teachers. (named "Range")

=VLOOKUP(E2,Range,2)

Some of the cells return the correct name, others #N/A.

As far as I can tell they are all formatted exactly the same; I've
tried
several different formatting options. The correct ones stay the same;
the
no
data ones do not change either.

Any ideas?