Ok, so this is going to be a bit difficult to explain, AND I'm a newbie to
functions.

I've got one spreadsheet with an array of data that looks like this.

spreadsheet A

CL 45,000
CH 300
DE 8,884

As you can guess, the letters are in one column and the numbers in another.

spreadsheet B

BB 0
BZ 0
CL 0
CM 0
CN 0
DA 0
DE 0

So what I would like to do is copy the info from spreadsheet A to
spreadsheet B. I know that VLOOKUP can do this for me but generates an error
in spreadsheet B for every letter code that isn't in spreadsheet A. I'm
trying to avoid this and have the number values appear for letter codes in
spreadsheet B that are in spreadsheet A and a 0 for letter codes that aren't
in spreadsheet A.

Can anybody help?