Typically, you'd use MATCH, VLOOKUP, or LOOKUP to solve your issue....but, if
the cell may NOT always contain high, medium, or low...

This is durable against that situation and returns zero:
=SUM(COUNTIF(A1,{"Low","Medium","High"})*{1,2,3})

and it's shorter than something like this (which does the same thing):
=IF(ISNA(MATCH(A10,{"Low","Medium","High"},0)),0,M ATCH(A10,{"Low","Medium","High"},0))

Note: you could also list "Low","Medium","High" in a range and reference
that instead.

Does that give you something you can work with?
***********
Regards,
Ron

XL2002, WinXP


"Pete" wrote:

I'm trying to give a word/text a numeric value. High = 3, Medium = 2 and Low
= 1 etc.

I thought this could be done with a lookup table? If anyone has any
information on how to do this I'd be most appreciative.

Cheers,

Pete