You omitted the 4th argument, which defaults to TRUE. That means the table has to be sorted ascending.
I think in your case it is best to include the 4th argument as FALSE.

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel

"teacherpaul" wrote in message ...
|I am trying to assign numerical values to grade scores - b+, c- etc, however
| when i use lookup like this
|
=LOOKUP(C5,{"U","G-","G","G+","F-","F","F+","E-","E","E+","D-","D","D+","C-","C","C+","B-","B","B+","A-","A","A+","A*"},{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 ,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23})
| which I thought would work I get a #N/A message. Can someone tell me where
| I'm going wrong? I'm using Excel 2003.