Merged Cells Wks Lookup

Hi

I have the following problem


Col1 Col2
Val1 Val a
.....Val b
Val2 Val a
.....Val b
Val3 Valc
.....Val a
Vall1 , Val 2 and Val3 are merged


In the worksheet Col1 is made up of merged cells So Say A1 and A2 would be merged to Val 1.
There is another spreadsheet with very similar data, so I want to somehow lookup the values in this spreadsheet.I could do this using an array lookup, but because these cells are merged A1 == Val1 , but A2 == 0. Is it possible to do this? I don't want to resort to coding a solution because the values are in different spreadsheets, and I haven't had much success in accessing data from spreadsheets not open in VBA.

I need to lookup values based on both columns eg Val1 AND Val b

Would be best if you unmerged the cells, lookups do not like merged cells,