Question

I have a spreadsheet which contains ‘unique’ IDs. The problem is that they are only case sensitive unique, meaning that I have: a06D000000QO5uW & a06D000000QO5uw.

I want to perform a vlookup on these IDs and pull back a related value. It’s possible to do case sensitive matching using this article I found:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214264

The problem I have found is that because the vlookup is nested within the Exact function, it returns the first match it finds, which may not be the one I am after. If I use the data sample from the article, it looks like:

Name    Age     Joe
Mary    32  
joe     48  
Bob     53  
Sue     27  
Joe     30  

and the look up looks like:

=IF(EXACT(C1,VLOOKUP(C1,A1:B6,1,FALSE))=TRUE,VLOOKUP(C1,A1:B6,2,FALSE),"No exact match")

The problem seems to be that the vlookup to test “Joe” comes across “joe” first of all and because it isn’t case sensitive returns that as a match – meaning it never gets to “Joe”. The exact function then fails because it is trying to test “Joe” against “joe”.

Is there any way around this? I really wanted to avoid going down the VBA route because we have a mix of Mac and Window users and so I wanted to keep it to formulas.

Answer 1

Your problem (with this exact example) is covered here

• The array formula (press Ctrl ShiftEnter
  ) together will return 30 against joe (NA if no match is found). =INDEX(B1:B6,MATCH(1,--EXACT(A1:A6,C1),0))
• A more straightforward formula mentioned in the same article is =LOOKUP(1,1/EXACT(A1:A6,C1),B1:B6)