I am working on doing a vlookup for values on another that may or may
not be in a different order. Vlookup won't pick these words up, so I
was wondering if anyone knew a solution or a way to alphabetize the
words with each cell so that vlookup will work in all cases. Thanks in
advance.


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Can you post your formula here with a bit more description?

If you are using VLOOKUP with the fourth parameter set to TRUE or 1 or
omitted, then the lookup data will have to be sorted and your result
will be the value in the lookup table closest to (and less than if not
an exact match) the search data. However, if this parameter is set to
FALSE or 0, then you will be looking for exact matches and the data
does not need to be in any particular order.

Hope this helps.

Pete

The fourth parameters is set false because I am cross-referencing data
appearing in one sheet that doesn't appear in another. The problem is
that some words will show up a few different times with different data
attached in corresponding cells. Some of the words also appear in
varying orders, but I need vLookup to include those as well. Setting
the fourth parameter to true or false or grab that data.

I was told that there is a way to alphabetize the data within a cell
though. With that I could get the data I need but I have no idea what
function in excel can do this. I know this is all a little vague, but
thats because the work I do in excel is not number-based and a little
tricky to understand.


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Yes, it is still very vague - how can you expect people to help?

I repeat:

Can you post your formula here with a bit more description?

Pete

Well the help I expected was more in the form of can I alpabetize words
within a cell? (Yes/No) I can solve my own problem with that. Otherwise
just forget everything else I said because I can't explain in any more
detail about my setup. Right now I am just using a standard vlookup.
ie. =vlookup(cell value,column range,x,false)


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I don't understand your term "alphabetize". Can you explain what you
mean by this with reference to some simple words? For example, if the
words you had were dog, horse, monkey, what would you expect to happen
if these were "alphabetized"?

Trying to help...

Pete

Pete

I interpret this to mean "sort" words in a cell.

dog, horse, monkey would be ascending.

monkey, horse, dog would be descending.

I am sure someone out there has written a UDF for this.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On 5 May 2006 16:09:59 -0700, "Pete_UK" wrote:

I don't understand your term "alphabetize". Can you explain what you
mean by this with reference to some simple words? For example, if the
words you had were dog, horse, monkey, what would you expect to happen
if these were "alphabetized"?

Trying to help...

Pete

Thanks, Gord, that's what I thought it meant, though I'm not sure how
this relates to the OP's problem - I think he has multiple entries in
his lookup table and will always find the first exact match and he
doesn't want this, but he is reluctant to give any further details so
I'm not sure how we can help him.

Pete

We can wait for OP to follow up, is all.

Gord

On 5 May 2006 17:31:39 -0700, "Pete_UK" wrote:

Thanks, Gord, that's what I thought it meant, though I'm not sure how
this relates to the OP's problem - I think he has multiple entries in
his lookup table and will always find the first exact match and he
doesn't want this, but he is reluctant to give any further details so
I'm not sure how we can help him.

Pete

Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP