Question

I have tried hours and hours of examples but I continually get the same error of #NAME?

I need to use VLOOKUP within a VBA function and then work with the result before putting the result to a cell. Firstly I am having a problem just to get the VBA VLOOKUP part working.

For testing here is the details
Spreadsheet is…

Worksheet = Sheet1

4 rows x 2 columns of data.
Cells D1:E4
Dance : 23
French : 42
English : 2
Music : 33

In cell A1 I will have a user imputed content that will a value from column D eg French

In Cell B1 I will call the function
=GetQty(A1,D1:E4,2)
but I always get #NAME?

1) How do I call the function properly. Am I doing this corretly?

In my VBA function “GetQty” I just want to do the VLOOKUP on a value of cell A1 and return the value from the matching entry from the table(Cell D1:E4), eg return 42 and then place that value into column B1 and (also column C1 via the VBA and not just using a formula in the worksheet cell of =B1 )

Here is one of the many examples I have tried in my function just to get the VLOOKUP to work.

Function GetQty(Celly As Range, CellyRange As Range, Colretval As Integer) As Integer
Dim result As String
Dim sheet As Worksheet
Set sheet = ActiveWorkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")
GetQty = Application.WorksheetFunction.VLookup(sheet.Range(CellyRange), sheet.Range(CellyTable), Colretval, False)
End Function

I have tried many examples but I always get #NAME? error

Answer 1

There are a few issues, mainly:

• First argument for Vlookup cannot be a range, needs to be a value
• It’s safer to not declare the return type as Integer

Here’s a working example of how to use Vlookup from VBA, maybe it’ll help (you call it just VLookup):

Function VBAVlookup(ByVal search As Variant, _
                    cell_range As Range, _
                    offset As Long, _
                    Optional opt As Boolean = False)

Dim result As Variant
result = WorksheetFunction.VLookup(search, cell_range, offset, opt)
'do some cool things to result

VBAVlookup = result

End Function

Unless what you are doing is rather sophisticated, you can always use =Vlookup(...) * 55 +2 and stuff like that to return a manipulated result from vlookup using just one formula.