I have a spreadsheet that has payroll totals by each employee and by
department.

I created a table cross-referencing the department code to the position,
supervisor, and location.

I wanted to be able to run the spreadsheet each month, correlate it to the
table and have the information from the table populate based on the
department code. I tried to do this with VLOOKUP but the departments can be
numerical or alphanumeric.

The numeric with 6 digits work and the alphanumeric work. However, when the
numeric go to eight digits, it pulls the description from the highest six
digit department.

For example 55102101 pull from 714043.

I've tried changing the formats between numeric and text but can't get it to
work. Any ideas?