Sorry for the reply to the same message, but I thought I would link to
another screen shot. I hope this makes my description of the issue a little
more clear.

I appreciate any help.

http://wehrmacher.zenfolio.com/img/v3/p625989389.jpg
--
Bill Wehrmacher


"T. Valko" wrote:

What version of Excel are you using?

I think this feature was removed from Excel 2007.

Assuming you have the table setup.
Goto ToolsOptionsCalculation tabAccept labels in formulasOK

=blue twelve

Screencap:

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/2275/labelsuw8.jpg

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Wehrmacher" wrote in message
...
I have a need for a look-up table function in Excel. The look-up functions
are combersome for my particular application.

I can create a table, for example prices, with several named rows and
columns. I need to find values in the table based on imported data which
contains elements which would define which row and column a value would be
returned. For example, if my price table has prices for red, blue, and
yellow
balls, of ten, twelve, and fifteen inch diameters and my input data is a
contains two columns that contain the color and diameter pairs, I would
like
to use the values in the columns to fabricate a "=blue twelve" like
command
that would extract the appropriate price from a table with those named
ranges.

Thus far I have been forced to concatenate the values in the input data
columns with the appropriate equal sign and space for each of the rows,
copy
the result to a word document, copy the word document content and paste it
back into the spreadsheet. Excel thinks I have typed in that content and
happily finds the prices. although it is a horrible thing to do 50 times
a
month with different input data with thousands of rows. It seems that
since
Excel has the "=RowName ColumnName" function, one should be able to
compute
the commands on the fly.

Any ideas on this? I expect this is really a database function, but we
would like to accomplish it in Excel if possible.

Thanks