Excel Excel help required please!

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mmawilkinson82

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Hi all

I have a spreadsheet with three worksheets - one frontsheet, one processing sheet and a back sheet with a list of processes on my system.

What I have set up is a drop-down menu using Data Validation lists to select processes for a quality plan and combined this with a formula to autofill the adjacent cells from the backsheet - depending on which process I select.

However, some of the processes (when selected) are bringing up a #VALUE error and I cannot understand what I am doing wrong (being a novice with Excel).

The formula is :

=IF(B9="","",VLOOKUP($B9,'PROCESSES LIST'!$B$2:$E$75,2,FALSE))

I cannot post the sheet itself due to company policy but would be interested to see if anyone can let me know why most of the other processes work but some return this value.

FYI - the "adjacent information" being filled in using this formula is merely - e.g SECTION 6

Thanks,
Rich
 
For the processes that you have listed in B9, are any of them very long names/descriptions? There is a limitation in a VLOOKUP formula that the value used for the Lookup has to be less than 255 characters. Exceeding that will lead to Excel returning the #VALUE! error you are receiving.
 
I've just had a look and none of the processes exceed 255 characters.
However, I have just tried deleting the process and creating it again in the list - bingo the error has not occurred this time!

I don't know enough about Excel to understand why it has not occurred now - but looks like it's sorted now.

Thanks for replying :)
 
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