Hi all. Does anyone know if there are character limitations on Vlookup or
Sumif formulas? I have a file where the cell I am looking up is quite long.
And I seem to recall a while back that vlookup only reads the first x
characters in the lookup cell. Is this true? Thanks for youe help!

Probably 255 characters.

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Regards,
Tom Ogilvy


"Steph" wrote:

Hi all. Does anyone know if there are character limitations on Vlookup or
Sumif formulas? I have a file where the cell I am looking up is quite long.
And I seem to recall a while back that vlookup only reads the first x
characters in the lookup cell. Is this true? Thanks for youe help!

The max length of the string is 255.


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com


"Steph" wrote in message
...
Hi all. Does anyone know if there are character limitations on
Vlookup or Sumif formulas? I have a file where the cell I am
looking up is quite long. And I seem to recall a while back
that vlookup only reads the first x characters in the lookup
cell. Is this true? Thanks for youe help!

Sorry to re-open an old thread but this is exactly the issue for me. Is there
a way to circumvent the 255 limit?

It seems to me this is a limitation of reading anything from an unopened
external workbook - a cell reference has exactly the same limit.

It also seems that if you open the target (source) workbook then the full
text becomes available regardless of length.

So one way around it is to cause the target to be opened. It would be nice
to avoid that though.

Andrew