It did fail your test, and the CLEAN function did the trick too....I was
unaware of that function. Thanks...I can go home and feel good about the day
today....I learned something new !

"Duke Carey" wrote:

One simple test is to enter a formula that checks to see if the two are
identical

=(a1=d1)

which will return TRUE if they match and FALSE if they don't. You'll almost
assuredly get a FALSE because otherwise the VLOOKUP would match the two.

In addition to TRIM you could try CLEAN() to remove non-printing characters.

"Eric @ BP-EVV" wrote:

I have a vlookup that is retunring an "#N/A" for one item in a spreadsheet.
I have added a "trim" function to the mix to get rid of extra spaces and it
still returns the same. The values in both the cell being looked up and the
cell that SHOULD contain the match appear to be the same text to me. Is
there a way to determine exactly what is the differences ? Both cells contain
text only (or at least that's all that is visible to the naked eye !)

Thanks !