Re: Formatting cells so VLOOKUP works

[Geoff Barraclough <Geoff.Barraclough@PUNCHPUBS.CO.UK>]

Enter a 1 in a blank cell
Copy it
Select all your "numbers" that are actually text
Edit>PasteSpecial>Values
Tick Multiply

Et voila - all your "text numbers" are now real numbers

Rgds
Geoff

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>  -----Original Message-----
> From:         MS Excel General Q & A List
> <EXCEL-G@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM>@ADLANS   On Behalf Of Gary Birch
> <gbirch@TYCO-BSPD.COM>
> Sent: 28 July 2003 13:13
> To:   EXCEL-G@PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM
> Subject:      Formatting cells so VLOOKUP works
> 
> Hi there,
> 
>       I've noticed that sometimes after running a query or pasting
> data
> into a spreadsheet I am unable to get VLOOKUP to work. The problem
> seems to
> be that the cell containing the data I am looking up is formatted
> differently to the corresponding cell in the table in which vlookup is
> looking.
>       The only way I can get around this is either copying the cell
> exactly
> from one sheet to another (which is very time consuming!) or
> formatting the
> column as text and then going down the column hitting F2 then enter.
> This
> seems to allow the lookup to work properly.
>       Does anybody know why this happens and if there is a way of
> getting
> around it. I'm using office XP. Not sure if other versions of office
> have
> this problem.
> 
>       PS (I know this is slightly unusual, but I need some extra RAM
> and
> I've noticed that you can get registered or non-registered RAM. Is it
> worth
> paying extra for the registered or not?)
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> 
> Gary.
> 
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