I have a worksheet of data that is auto-generated and can't be modified. It
has names of accounts, along with contact types and contact names.

Acct1 Sales Fred
Acct1 Support Ralph
Acct1 Other Sam
Acct2 Sales Tim
etc..

I want to do a vlookup into that spreadsheet, knowing the account name and
contact type, and return the contact name. I can't seem to figure out how to
do an embedded vlookup to do this. Any suggestions? Based on other threads in
this forum, I've thought of using an "IF" statement, but there can be and
unlimited number of contact types, so I would not know how many times to
recurse the "IF". There was also the thought of adding a column to the table
data, concatenating the two fields, but I can't modify the spreadsheet.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

- Pete

You might not want to amend the original file, but can't you open it
and then do File | Save As and give it a different name? That way you
are working on a copy of it, so any amendments you do will not affect
the original. If you insert a new column C and concatenate columns A
and B together with:

=A1&B1

copied down, then you can perform your lookup on column C.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Mar 12, 4:19*pm, PeteJ wrote:
I have a worksheet of data that is auto-generated and can't be modified. It
has names of accounts, along with contact types and contact names.

Acct1 * * *Sales * * * Fred
Acct1 * * *Support * *Ralph
Acct1 * * *Other * * * Sam
Acct2 * * *Sales * * * *Tim
etc..

I want to do a vlookup into that spreadsheet, knowing the account name and
contact type, and return the contact name. I can't seem to figure out how to
do an embedded vlookup to do this. Any suggestions? Based on other threads in
this forum, I've thought of using an "IF" statement, but there can be and
unlimited number of contact types, so I would not know how many times to
recurse the "IF". There was also the thought of adding a column to the table
data, concatenating the two fields, but I can't modify the spreadsheet.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

- Pete