Try selecting the whole column of the Lookup_value and go to Data / Text to
Columns - select Delimeted then Finish (if your data is text you will need
to select text before Finish utherwiseyou will lose preceeding zeros)
Do the same on the column you are looking up

the vlookup can be in place as you do it and if successful the data will
come through

when you do the text to columns you will see the data format

"Maki" wrote:

Hi all,

What's the cause of incidents when data in two cells, looking exactly the
same, are not recognised by Excel as the same?

It happens quite often when:
- vlookup function doesn't return any value even though the lookup_value
exist and looking exactly the same in lookup table;
- the same data appears multiple times when you do advanced filtering and
check "unique records only" checkbox; etc. etc.

I've looked at usual suspects, like numbers entered as text?, space at the
end of the record?, so on so forth, but, believe it or not, sometimes, these
things are exactly the same, at least to my naked eyes, and still Excel seems
to think they are different.

What other causes can there be in cases like this?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
--
Maki @ Canberra.AU