One way:

=VLOOKUP(LEFT(A1,3),B1:C25,2,0)

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HTH,

RD
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Please keep all correspondence within the Group, so all may benefit!
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"roger" wrote in message
...
I need to do a look up based on the first three places in the reference cell

a1 is cda1428a I want the vlookup to return the data based on the cda only.

How do you do this?