Excel - When data look exactly the same but...

Asked By Maki

19-Feb-10 12:49 AM

Hi all,

What's the cause of incidents when data in two cells, looking exactly the
same, are not recognised by Excel as the same?

It happens quite often when:
- vlookup function does not return any value even though the lookup_value
exist and looking exactly the same in lookup table;
- the same data appears multiple times when you do advanced filtering and
check "unique records only" checkbox; etc. etc.

I have looked at usual suspects, like numbers entered as text?, space at the
end of the record?, so on so forth, but, believe it or not, sometimes, these
things are exactly the same, at least to my naked eyes, and still Excel seems
to think they are different.

What other causes can there be in cases like this?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
--
Maki @ Canberra.AU

19-Feb-10 05:20 AM

Try selecting the whole column of the Lookup_value and go to Data / Text to
Columns  - select Delimeted  then Finish (if your data is text you will need
to select text before Finish utherwiseyou will lose preceeding zeros)
Do the same on the column you are looking up

the vlookup can be in place as you do it and if successful the data will
come through

when you do the text to columns you will see the data format

19-Feb-10 10:06 AM

Sorry, but my mindreading powers are weakened by the kryptonite sitting next
to me.

Exactly how are you using VLOOKUP?  What is the lookup value?  What values
are in the lookup table?  How are the values derived?  For example, is text
imported; are numbers the result of formulas?

If you are looking at numbers with decimal fractions that are the result of
formulas, it is quite common that the displayed value is not exactly equal to
the underlying actual value.

If you are looking at text that was imported, it is quite common that what
appears to be spaces are actually a non-breaking spaces (NBSPs), ASCII code
160.

There are ways of dealing with both.  But it really is not worth the time to
explore each problem, since there is no way to know which one applies to your
situation, if either does.


----- original message -----

19-Feb-10 10:16 AM

Assuming you are not finding leading or trailing spaces and the information
being looked up is numeric in nature then I would suggest that the issue is
most likely text and numbers. If cells with numeric data are being stored as
text just chaning the cell format does not change the underlying text to
numbers. You still need to convert the text to numbers. Easiest wasy is to
place a 1 in an unused cell Copy it and paste special | Multiply over the
range of numbers. To catch this error in your vlookup you can use countif to
distinguish text from numbers. Countif treats everything as text so it will
find matches when one cell is text and the other number.

=if(countif(A1:A10, D1) = 0, "Not Found", vlookup(D1, A1:B10, 2, 0))

If countif finds a match then it proceeds to the vlookup. If the vlookup
returns an error then you have a data type mismatch between text and number.
--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson