How to vlookup with long item description

Hello,

I'm trying to Vlookup the value below and got errors all the time. The only thing that I think of was separating the item number out of the long text. However, this data was pulled from Oracle and it will overwrite the data to long text again when I refresh the system. Please advise and help.

17001~CHKIT ULTRA BALL2-PKMED

I think the problem might be the symbol "~". This is used in many Excel formulae as an "escape" character, which allows you to look for wildcard characters as literal texts.

Are the first five digits unique? If so you could do this with your formula:

=VLOOKUP(LEFT(A1,5)&"*",table,column,FALSE)

as VLOOKUP allows you to use wildcards.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Thank you, your suggestion is accurate. I modified the formula a bit but it got it worked out.

=VLOOKUP(LEFT(E16,FIND("~",E16)-1)&"*",$A:$B,2,FALSE)

Yes, I wasn't sure if it was always 5 digits, but glad you reached a solution.

Pete