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  • Thread starter Thread starter Joe H.
  • Start date Start date
J

Joe H.

I am having trouble with the "vlookup" function
recoginzing an excel spreadsheet. The original file was e-
mailed to me in a ".txt" (tab delimited)format. I
imported it into excel and opened it with no problem. I
then dropped the lines of the excel spreadsheet into the
template. It appears that the vlookup function does not
recognized the items on the other spreadsheet it is
searching through. Both sheets have the same cell
formats. What am I doing wrong?
 
First and foremost ( and before anything else either for that matter :-> ), if you are bringing
in data from the web, or pretty much any external source, you need the 'Doctor McRitchie
Wonder Cure' for all manner of ailments that might beset your data. The protection I allude
to is none other than Dave's TrimAll macro, freely available from the following link:-

http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/join.htm#trimall

Get a copy of it inside your personal.xls so it is always available to you, select the data
involved and then run it. This routine will strip out all those nasty little non breaking spaces,
and just about every other piece of garbage that might happen to come along with your data. Once
you have cleaned your data using this routine, you can then copy an empty space, select any data
that still appears to be text (or even your entire data range), and then do Edit / Paste Special /
Add. This should then coerce any text 'numbers' back to numeric.

If you were after text anyway, then you can omit the last step.
 
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