I have been using vlookup for several years now and occasionally run into
this problem. My visually exact match does not find a match.

I am looking for an exact match in another table. My formula is
=VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!Query_from_Navision,2,FALSE).

The actual data in A1 is 195397.
There is a record in my Sheet2!Query_from_Navision.
column A
195397
Column B
SSU

It does not find it because when I compare the "195397" from the field I am
looking up on and the "195397" in the list, they return a false using =exact.

I have tried using the =clean function on both pieces of data. I have used
the =cell looking at all the attributes, but they match.
How can I see why the data does not match exactly?

Try using this formula on both:

=ISNUMBER(cell_reference)

If they were matches both would return TRUE. I'm guessing that one will
return FALSE. The one that returns FALSE is a TEXT string. Numeric 195397
and TEXT 195397 do not match. It could be that the cell containing the TEXT
number is formatted as TEXT or the cell could contain unseen characters like
leading/trailing spaces which make it text. The CLEAN function will not
remove leading/trailing spaces, the TRIM function will.

Biff

"Beth" wrote in message
...
I have been using vlookup for several years now and occasionally run into
this problem. My visually exact match does not find a match.

I am looking for an exact match in another table. My formula is
=VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!Query_from_Navision,2,FALSE).

The actual data in A1 is 195397.
There is a record in my Sheet2!Query_from_Navision.
column A
195397
Column B
SSU

It does not find it because when I compare the "195397" from the field I
am
looking up on and the "195397" in the list, they return a false using
=exact.

I have tried using the =clean function on both pieces of data. I have
used
the =cell looking at all the attributes, but they match.
How can I see why the data does not match exactly?