You could use

VLOOKUP(LEFT(A1,4)&"*", ... etc

instead of

VLOOKUP(A1, ... etc

to obtain a match on the first four characters of A1, but if you have
multiple codes that begin with the same 4 characters this will only
find the first match.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Nov 18, 4:57 pm, reesrob wrote:
Hi

I need to match product codes from multiple spreadsheets and am using
vlookup. Have been succesful up to now but have now hit a point where the
data is not clean. So a product code on sheet 1 = abc1xyz whilst on sheet 2
the same product = abc1(xyz).

Unfortunately, there are multiple products with very similar names so the
use of [true] would appear to be problematic.

ANy ideas?