Hi Patricia,

That's exactly what I wrote. I also wrote the solution(s).Please read the entire text.

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel

"Patricia Lynch" wrote in message
...
| Niek- the cells are formatted "General". There are no leading space or
| trailing spaces. One other fix I just found is to move onto the cell, hit F2
| then move off of the cell..... this corrects the problem.
|
| "Niek Otten" wrote:
|
| ================================================== ===============
| Your Numbers don't behave (like numbers)
| Niek Otten, May 11, 2006
|
| Your numbers sort incorrectly, are not included in SUMs, cause #VALUE! results in formulas, cannot be found in LOOKUPs,
etc.
| In short:
|
| Your Numbers look like Numbers, but they really are Text.
| Sure! You formatted them as numbers, but alas, formatting afterwards doesn't help. Believe me, they are Text!
|
| Here's a checklist which will help you solve most known cases. Make a copy of your workbook before trying! Always use
Excel's
| ISNUMBER() function to check your cells; maybe you solved your problem in the first step!
|
| · Format an empty cell as Number. Enter the number 1 in it. EditCopy.
| Select your "numbers". EditPaste Special, check Multiply. Hopefully your cells are "real" Numbers now
| · If that doesn't help, there may be spaces in your "numbers". You can use the LEN() function to compare the
number
| of characters that Excel sees in the cell with the number of characters you see. If you suspect spaces, use Excel's TRIM()
| function to remove them
| · If that doesn't help, there may be nonprintable characters in your "numbers". You can use Excel's CLEAN()
function
| to remove most of them
| · If that doesn't help, there may be non-breaking spaces in your "numbers" (mostly acquired from Web Pages). Use
| David McRitchie's TRIMALL() function to remove them. It can be downloaded he
| http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm#trimall
|
|
|
| ================================================== ===============
|
| --
| Kind regards,
|
| Niek Otten
| Microsoft MVP - Excel
|
|
| "Patricia Lynch" wrote in message
| ...
| | when using vlookup on a list - I often find that I get N/A as an answer
| | unless I retype the item I am looking up. When I retype the value that I am
| | looking up, the correct corresponding value is then pulled from the list....
| | is there a workaround for this other than to retype every value you have to
| | look up?
| | thanks
|
|
|