Vlookup of 1 cell containing multiple search arguments

I really need to Thank you for all that information. So far everything has worked beautifully. I just had two more question, is there a way to tweak the formula to recognize the list in cell A2 separated by both a comma and a space? I forgot to mention the action items are separate by comma AND space. Not a big deal, I deleted the spaces and the formula worked great.

I have a second question. I applied the conditional formatting to a particular row based upon that B2 cell. It works but how would drag or apply the conditional formatting (hoping the formula updates based on B3, B4 ect) without having to do conditional formatting per column?

Strange originally it was giving me 0s when i had the spaces included, but it seems to be working now. And what you told me to do for the conditional formatting has also worked!! Awesome help! Thank you very much, I would never have figured that out on my own!

Hi Again,

All the above worked when I had two spreadsheets within the same directory on my local drive, now that I am trying it out with the original versions of the spreadsheets (on a shared drive in different directories) there are no results being returned. (I've performed all the same steps and entered the formulas exactly the same).

Thanks Again in Advance.

this is the modified formula as it pertains to my spreadsheet.

=SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(aconcat(IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(" "&'G:\Benefits\BERS\04 Rollout-II LOB\02 Specifications\00 Specs Tracking\[Project Issue List Current_1.xls]Other Issues'!$A$2:$A$329&" "," "&SUBSTITUTE(AH6,","," ")&" ")),'G:\Benefits\BERS\04 Rollout-II LOB\02 Specifications\00 Specs Tracking\[Project Issue List Current_1.xls]Other Issues'!$H$2:$H$329,"")," "))," ",",")

Seems to be bringing in for some rows no results and others showing every status irregarless of what action items were listed.

Ok this time, It seems that after I held down the CTRL+Shift+Enter for a few seconds longer, it just started working. Not sure if that was what did it, but it was the only thing i did different.

Now I have another request, really testing you here sorry for the bother.

Recall:
A2: contained a list of action items

sheet 2: was the spreadsheet which contained all the action items with their status.

What if I wanted to return the particular listed action item(s) in A2 that shows a status of "Open" in sheet 2? Does that change the formula alot?

The formula had been working well, (again this is on a share drive) then one of my co-workers open the spreadsheet and it begun returning 0s in addition to the action items.. I looked at the VB code, the formula, the linked spreadsheet and there's been no change. The 0's just appear as a nuisance. Any ideas what could have changed?