Concatenate both the 3 search keys and the keys in the table (in an extra column) and do a lookup on those

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Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel

"Kay" wrote in message ...
| Hello all,
|
| I have a customer who gets downloads of tons of live data into excel. Each
| day the data is downloaded, it must be compared to another database. For
| unexplained reasons other than size limitations, the data cannot be combined.
| Now, both databases include among others three fields..first name, last
| name, cost center.
| There could be several John Smiths each with a different cost center, but
| there could be multiple John Smiths in the same cost center. There is no
| other unique identifier for the record. They need to see if there is a
| matching record in the second database. A vlookup does not seem to work
| since you can only base the lookup on one value. I beleive you have to
| lookup on all three fields to really check for a match. What am I missing.
| Is there any way to do this?