Assuming the following:

Abbreviations in K1:K50
Full Names in L1:L50

Your state abbreviations in A1:A50

use

=VLOOKUP(A1,$K$1:$L$50,2,FALSE)

to return the full name of the state whose abbreviation is in your data in
cell A1.


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting
www.cpearson.com
(email on the web site)


"gls858" wrote in message
...
Mike H wrote:
There's a noce sorted list here

http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/usp...eviations.html

They're the wrong way round for what you want but that's simply a matter
of manually reversing the columns. Then

=VLOOKUP("AZ",A1:B59,2,FALSE)

AZ could of coyrse be a cell reference

Mike
"gls858" wrote:

Does anyone have a way of converting state abbreviations to the full
state name? Example AZ to Arizona. I have two lists I need to sort by
state and compare. One list has the abbreviation and the other the full
name. Of course they don't sort the same.

gls858


Thanks for the help Mike I finally got around to looking at this
and I can't seem to get VLOOKUP to do what I want. I'll try a more
detailed explanation of what I would like to do. Maybe that will help.
I have a list of names with address and the state is represented by
it's two letter abbreviation with multiple entries for each state
(over 500) like so:
AZ
AZ
AZ
AR
AR
AR
CA
CA


I would like to add another column with a formula that would change the
abbreviation to the full name like so:
Arizona
Arizona
Arizona
Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas
California
California

Is this possible with Vlookup?

gls858