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+1 A:

You can use wildcards in the lookup value argument. If cell A1 contains the text "alex is smart" you can use:

=VLOOKUP("*"& A1 &"*",A2:B3,2,FALSE)

You can also hard-code the lookup value like:

=VLOOKUP("*alex is smart*",A2:B3,2,FALSE)

Doug Glancy 2010-10-12 03:53:06

@doug: very very very cool idea!!!!!!!!!!!!! unfortunately it works only part of the time. please try it yourself on a large dataset

i am a girl 2010-10-12 15:29:00

Jenny. I tried it with 20,000 rows of unique data and a match in the last row. With 10,000 rows of vlookups, it's slow, but worked. This is Excel 2003. What do you mean by "works only part of the time?" When does it work and when doesn't it?

Doug Glancy 2010-10-13 03:25:32

@doug i would like to email u this file

i am a girl 2010-10-13 17:02:46

Jenny, I'm sorry but I'm swamped and don't have time to pursue this. Good luck!

Doug Glancy 2010-10-13 22:33:14

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can you use wildcards with vlookup?

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