I have a spreadsheet with 2 lists of data, each list contains a number of
columns, the 2 lists are not equal in length, list 1 is about 2,600 rows and
list 2 is about 50,000 rows

The left most column in each list contains part numbers, these are unique
values that sometimes contain alpha characters and sometimes not.

The first list is a 'finished' list that I wish to use for display, but the
second list has a column that contains a statistic that I have been asked to
incorporate into the finished list.

The second list also has most of the part numbers present in the first list
(about 94%), so I didn't think the task would be too hard, a relatively
simple formula should do the trick - but my formula has returned results that
I do not understand.

My formula is thus:

"=IF(COUNTIF($Q$2:$Q49959,A2636)<0,OFFSET($Q$1,MA TCH(A2636,$Q$2:$Q$49959,1),4,1,1),0)"

Now the formula works fine with the exception of the MATCH function, the
cell A2636 has the part number 1672312 with no spaces before or after.

The part number 1672312 exists in the second list in cell Q1557, again with
no spaces before or after and as can be seen by the formula, the value I want
is in the fifth column of the list.

The MATCH function seems to want to match to a part number 167-2222 which is
located in the cell Q7638.

I tried altering the format of the part number columns to text, but it made
no difference. I also tried altering the MATCH_TYPE argument of the function
from 1 to 0 to force an exact match, the formula then returns an error.

Now I do not consider myself an Excel novice and I know that this task would
be easily accomplished with a little VBA, but that's not the point. I have
read the help file again to make sure that I was using the MATCH function
correctly. I tried alternatives like VLOOKUP to see what it matched to, again
it matches to the same incorrect cell.

I suspect formatting of the part number columns somehow, but I don't know
how - the part number columns contain absolute values, no underlying
formula's, no linked cells or anything like that. Using the Formula Evaluate
tool shows me that the cell A2636 evaluates to the correct part number, but
from there is goes south.

Anyone have any ideas?
--
Regards - Peter