Problem with Vlookup as Vlookup Range is bigger than 256 characters

It appears that this is less of a data issue like you normally get with the 255 limit, but an operational/organisational. So the traditional INDEX workaround will not be of much help

Your lookup itself is straight forward but it becomes bloated due to your absolute path to the file location of your source data.

The obvious workaround would be to change the location of the files. Now I assume that you don't just need to do this on this one file, but on multiples in different folders.

What would be the application of the lookup? Your own use or multiple users?It does not look like you could work with a mapped drive as this won't significantly shorten the vlookups, as the file specific root starts fairly early. However is there scope to shortening the path by changing folder names?

Ultimately you may want to consider some form of 'localising' the file, either through a mapped drive or a true local copy, as your solution at the moment has a quite obvious pratical inconvenience: Your formula relates to a current month, so you will need to change this every time the month or the file location changes.

However all that being said you may be able to live with a simple trick:
Create one or more new tabs and simply point the cells there to the relevant cell in the source file, like

='V:\T....'

Select allOpen in new window

That way you create a carbon copy of the file locally in your workbook, but it does not give you much flexibility for months, file locations etc. That would still be a manual change each time..

hth
capt.

What happened to the UDF that we worked on here?

Your other thread

The string in both files should be identical. This is not the case in the given files. So you would not get the match. This is not a 255 char limit problem.

Sorry Chaps, I have put the Vlookup to another tab in the DummyRec attachment here to illustrate my problem. In the AD column on the "Rec" tab, I am getting a VALUE error message. Any ideas in combatting this problem?
DummyRec6.xlsx