I have been trying without success to combine a text string and date into a lookup value. The lookup value will then be used in VLOOKUP to get a value from another sheet.

My lookup value is a combination of three elements, a number that is in a text formatted cell, a hyphen and a number representation of a date. The values for the fields are as follows:

Text cell - 1013116
Date cell - 14-Dec-05, which is represented as the number 38700.

The two cells are combined with a hyphen in the middle. I use the CONCATENATE function to merge the cells together. I use the same formula on the second sheet to derive the the first column of the lookup range. The cell contents for both sheets appear the same. Both cells have the same cell format, TEXT.

The VLOOKUP does not work. There are not errors, VLOOKUP returns the last value in the range indicating that there was no match.

What am I doing wrong?????