No, VLOOKUP does not provide that facility... If your subsrting confirms to a
pattern then you can extract that in a helper column and lookup on that
column...

If you can come up with a formula which returns the whole string when
substring is passed to it then you can pass that as the lookup value...

I mean in =VLOOKUP(A1,...) replace A1 by the formula which returns a value
in the lookup col...

"Gilbert" wrote:

Is it possible to do a vlookup within a range? For example;

Column A Column B
A1 000-140101 A1 General Government
A2 190000-200301 A2 Public Protection
A3 410000-541001 A3 Culture & Rec
A4 990000-990001 A4 Public Ways

So Lets say I want to look up 190500 I would expect the formula to return
Public Protection.