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VLOOKUP and cell formats result in #N/A
I am having troubles with vlookup in excel. I know the values are in the table range i am looking up but am getting #n/a in my results. I know it is something with the format of the value i am checking or the format of the cells in the table i am looking in. I have had this in the past and end up making duplicate columns and formating everything differently to get it to work but i am sick of this. Is there a way to modify the vlookup statement to get results regardless of cell formatting?
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Answers
My table with results is not sorted. The formula is:
=VLOOKUP(C16,XRefList!J:O,
However when i create a cell =VALUE(C16) and then recreate my table with the values converted to =VALUE(Cell Reference) i can do a vlookup on the =VALUE(C16) cell against the the newly created range and it is sucessful.
The cells were in the number format already. I believe they got into the spreadsheet originally from a data dump somewhere (.csv file ?)
Most of the values are numeric but some are numeric/alpha combos
i guess the import stores them as text, so when i format the cells as numbers it is really just displaying them as numbers but still treating them as text.
Thanks for the solution - kinda convoluted but i guess thats excel....
I had this problem too. I was doing VLOOKUP in two different columns involving different sources. While the above solution worked on the one column, it didn't in the other. In my case the spreadsheet was dynamic in that it had code that allowed the user to import an ascii file to refresh the data and then did a bunch of other stuff, all with the click of a button. What I finally found was the problem in the second column was that the raw data query formated the data as text verses general. Once I changed that format in the input query, the VLOOKUP in the second column worked.
Rich
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by: webtubbsPosted on 2007-07-26 at 18:13:44ID: 19579561
Hello saunaG,
The cell format should have no effect on the VLOOKUP formula, as long as the underlying values are the same.
Have you got the 4th parameter of the formula set to FALSE? Can you post your VLOOKUP formula?
Regards,
Wayne