Question

So I have a sheet similar to this:

   A         B        C        D        E        F
1  Name      Age      Number   Gender   Player   player No.
2  Droid12   11                M        Droid12  F3
3  R2D2      13                M        C3P0     F12
4  C3P0      12                F        Bot13    Y7
5  YVH7707   11                F        J34      Z2
6  Bot13     15                M
7  Slim33    13                F
8  ABot43    14                F
9  DBo11     11                M
10 J34       12                M

I am trying to fill in Column C with the player number, if the person in question has one (Imagine that the sheet is thousands of time this large).

I have the following VLookup function in each cell in C (copied down from C1, of course):

=VLOOKUP(A2, $E$2:$F$5, 2,FALSE)

And am getting the result:

#N/A

When I try to step through, I get the error

Sheet1!$A$2 = Droid12: The cell currently being evaluated contains a
constant

Anyone have an idea what I’m doing wrong?

Thank you!

EDIT

I’ve tried some of these fixes, with no positive results. I tried this in C1-C3:

C2 contains:

=IF(A2=E2, F2, FALSE)

With the result that cell C2 contains the value Droid12

C3 contains:

=VLOOKUP(A2, $E$2:$F$3, 2, FALSE)

and is getting a #N/A error (with the same error:

Sheet1!$A$2 = Droid12: The cell currently being evaluated contains a
constant

The values are all standardized (Trimmed,etc…), and there is definitely a match in the range I’m comparing to, so I really can’t see what I’m doing wrong. Anyone ever experience this before?

edit 2

I fixed it, turns out I had Player No. In column E and Player in Column F, so the comparison for some reason was not running correctly. I switched those two entities around, and the VLOOKUP worked fine. Weird, but I’m not complaining. Thanks to everyone who tried to help!

Answer 1

Usually it happens if there is no exact match. Try to use trim and wildcard chars to allow matching to skip spaces. For example:

=VLOOKUP(CONCATENATE("*",TRIM(A2),"*"), $E$2:$F$5, 2,FALSE)