You can use VLOOKUP without having exact matching values simply by setting
the last argument of the formula to TRUE instead of FALSE. Problem with
VLOOKUP though is that it looks for the value that's less than or equal to
your lookup value. So with a lookup value of 2 you'll get A instead of B,
which is incorrect anyway.

What you can do is use a combination of INDEX and MATCH functions. So if
your lookup values are in column C, you can try:
=INDEX($B$1:$B$15,MATCH(C1,$A$1:$A$15,-1))
Note: you'll need to reverse sort your original data in columns A and B for
this to work

--
-Simon


"Dave P" wrote:

I can't use VLOOKUP because the 400 or so values that I have do not match the
values in my column A, they are for example 1.3, 5.6 or 27.1

"Ron Rosenfeld" wrote:

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:40:03 -0700, Dave P <Dave
wrote:

is there an alternative to using IF, as I believe one is limited to 7 IF
statements in a formulae.

My scenario is;

Column A contains 15 different values, let's say
1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23,25,27,29
Column B has corresponding Letters A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O

I would like to run a formula against approx 400 numbers, (most between 0 &
29) and return the corresponding letter

ie
IF A1 <=1,A,IF A1 <=3,B etc etc - obviously I can't use IF because I am
limited to 7 IFs.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated !!

Use VLOOKUP

--ron