Vlookup, against a messy payroll file range of results

Hi

I have a very messy payrol file that I am dumping into a tab, and display nicely in another, and I need to do a vlookup/index etc against a name and a date to display hours (which I manually typed in and highlighted - where i need the formula)
Unfortunately the report has multiple dates per user and I can't think how vlookup each one, I need to check for a space or something.
As I have hundreds of employess and my system report is not editable, I was hoping to get excel to do the heavy lifting.
Hopefully some one can help me.