Weirdest problem ever - excel not matching matching text

I cant explain it really well other than showing an example in file, so I have attached it here.

Basically I downloaded a file with hourly data. I copy pasted it to a new excel document. The index key of the data is two time stamps with the word "to" in between. Like so: [2014-11-18 01:00:00*to 2014-11-18 02:00:00]

For the purpose of what I'm doing, I manually recreated a table with some identical index strings, so I would be able to use LOOKUP to find the value for any of the rows in the original data. Let's say I wanted the value for the time slot 2014-11-18 01:00:00*to 2014-11-18 02:00:00, I would use a lookup function in the table to get the value corresponding to that timeslot.

The only problem is, even if I type the PERFECT match of the index string into my lookup formula, it still comes out with an #N/A error.

It shouldnt be formatting, because the 'EXACT' formula ignores formatting, and still returns FALSE when I try to directly match the index key to my manually entered key. I'm thinking it might be something to do with ASCII/HTML character mismatch or something, but really have run out of ideas how to work it.

/A