If your problem is it "is just showing the formula in the cell", then your
cell is formatted as text.

Format it as General, and re-enter your formula.

It should work then.

Regards,
Fred

"Celia" wrote in message
...
I have data which has come from PeopleSoft. One file is a list of current
employees (about 4,500 rows) including a unique ID and I am looking up
their
date of birth in another file which is list of all employees, past and
present (just over 7,000 rows). For some reason the vlookup is not
returning
any data and is just showing the formula in the cell. I feel the problem
is
something in the format of the data coming from PeopleSoft but can't think
of
anything else to try. I use vlookup heaps so don't think there is
anything
wrong with the formula.

I have checked that the employee IDs are numbers, not text and that there
are no leading or trailing spaces.
I have checked that the DOB is a date format.
I tried copying the data from the all employees file into a sheet in the
current employees file and doing the lookup from there.
I tried naming the lookup range.
I tried sorting by ID even though I don't need to as it's exact match.

Data in the files looks something like:

ID Name DOB
10001 Jones,Fred
10005 Smith,John

and in the "all employees" list, the DOB uses the first date format
(*dd/mm/yyyy).

Formula reads: =VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet4!$A$1:$B$7291,2,false)

Any help will be greatly appreciated!
--
Celia from sunny Australia