Hi!

Try this:

=VLOOKUP("january*",A5:B10,2,0)

Or:

A1 = january

=VLOOKUP(A1&"*",A5:B10,2,0)

Note: if you enter January 06 or January 2006 in a cell Excel will
automatically format those entries as DATES and the lookup would fail. You
would have to enter those values as TEXT.

Biff

"hotelmasters" wrote in message
...
do you know how i can lookup value that isn't precise. for example if i
was using a vlookup function is there a way to lookup a value that isn't
exact, as if i was looking up "January" but wanted to include cells that
contain
either January or January '06 or January 2006?

thanks