I guess the problem is that apostrophe is NOT the first character of the
string but a sign for Excel to handle cell content as text despite cell
format is NOT text.
Maybe you could try to store stings in text formatted cells (in this way you
can spare apostrophes), or to use TEXT(cellref),"@") instead of plain cellref
in Lookups if you search text strings.
Note! If you change cell format to text, it won't convert existing cell
content to string, you have to convert it with Text function and copy back in
the cell reformatted like text.

Give examples if problem is still not solved, but I come back to them only
Monday, I finished for today:

Stefi


€žexoticdisease€� ezt Ã*rta:

The indirect function was pretty close and it started giving me values that I
wanted, but then bloody excel removed the "'" (apostrophe) character from the
beginning of my text string which is to be used as a lookup function and it
started giving me #REFs! Is there any way to stop excel removing the
apostrophe symbol when it's the first character of a text string?