One of the biggest problems I find with lookup in general is that it looks for an exact value. One extra space here or there will throw it off. Therefore trim removes the leading the trailing spaces. Adding the wildcards in allow you to get a fuzzy approach to vlookup. If you really want to go 'fuzzy' check out Alan's code. Towards the end of the thread he gives the most recent fuzzy vlookup code for the UDF and even has added soundex to it. Good stuff if you really need to get creative.

Hope this helps.

abousetta