Hi Khers

There are 2 ways 2 do this.

a) Insert a column before B and give the formulae as =left(a1,3) and then
use lookup or vlookup.
b) If it is not a very big sheet then use vlookup instead of lookup. the
formulae shall be =VLOOKUP(123,range,2,0)

These methods shall work as per your requirement.

Regards,
Raj

"khers Field" wrote:

I have a table of values like this from A1 to B4
A B
1 123 wall
2 254 chair
3 389 book
4 478 pen

Now I want to write a function (maybe with "lookup") to look at the
first tree characters in coloum A and return the value of it (here,
writen in coloumb B) I have tried with this:

A B C
1 123 wall =lookup(left(A1;3);A1:B4;2)
2 254 chair
3 389 book
4 478 pen

but I get #N/A in C1
if I write =lookup(123;A1:B4;2) I get 2
where as I would like to get wall

can anyone help pls?