I have a spreadsheet that has employees badge numbers in the first column,
employee names in the second column and employee department numbers in the
third column. I have a vlookup formula in another workbook that links to this
spreadsheet, when you type the employee's badge number it is supposed to
automatically bring up the employee's name in the cell in the next column.

Most of the time it works just fine, but every once in awhile it comes up
with the incorrect employee's name. Sometimes it is four or five rows above
the correct employee's name (and the badge numbers aren't even close to being
the same). The spreadsheet is alphabetized by employee name.

I looked online and saw that when using the vlookup function you have to
make sure that cells with numbers in them aren't formatted as text. I made
sure that all of the cells with numbers are formatted as numbers. But I don't
know if this will help or not, since the problem seems to happen randomly.

To fix the problem I just re-do the formula and then it seems to work fine,
but not everyone using the forms knows how to do this and some of the forms
are protected.

Hopefully this makes sense. Thank you for your help.