Hi Max,
Thanks for your input. I tried shortening the names but it didn't make a
difference - I have Excel from a 2003 package so maybe it allows for more
characters than 97.
I did however read more of the other posts and came upon one with a link to
macros written by David Ritchie for Excel, as well as a wealth of tips on the
VLOOKUP function. I had a suspicion that the VLOOKUP wasn't recognizing the
lookup values and that could be because the values came from different excel
lists which probably had different formats. I tried selecting the column with
the lookup values and changing the cell formats to General (and to Number and
again to Text when that didn't work) but I still got # N/A. Then, under the
heading: "Find out what you have-it may not be what it looks like" at the URL
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm he spoke about cell
formatting and mentioned that "Changing the format between Text and Number
will have no effect on data already entered, but re-entry of data will be
changed if valid."

So, I had a colleague who was gracious enough to re-enter all of the several
hundred codes into the lookup value colum and now it works!!!

Thanks for your help on this - I have learned soooo much and gathered more
information on this "journey" than I expected! This is most appreciated!

Kind regards,

Rochelle

"Max" wrote:

... maybe a penny for the thoughts ? <g

--
Rgds
Max
xl 97
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