"Peo Sjoblom" wrote in message
...
He is using a newsreader

Indeed - I didn't even know there was another way of reading this.. Is there
a copy of these posts on a forum or something, then?
I prefer news-readers thought - it's all just so much....quicker!

There was one problem with the formula - the first 5 characters of a product
determine the actual main generic product, for which there might or might
not be extra characters, and there may or may not be an image with a
different ending.
In other words: product: 12345-large image: 12345-various.jpg
I got totally stumped because I made an error (didn't put a . before the *)
and went hunting in forums, one of which seemed to suggest that regular
expressions must be prefixed by "/..", and so I tried a variation and ended
up with:
=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(A16&/..*;$D$2:$D$5000;1;0));"";VLOOKUP(A16&/..*;$d$2:$d$5000;1;0))
Of course, it didn't work, and I spent a good couple of hours trying to wrap
a LEFT statement round it (you can tell I'm new to this!).
In the end, it actually just ended up being
=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(A16&".*";$D$2:$D$5000;1;0));"";VL OOKUP(A16&".*";$D$2:$D$5000;1;0))

(Know a lot more about regular expressions and vlookup than I did 3 hours
ago, though!)

Anyway, thanks for all the help.