So far (from the data I have been given) data will only lie in one column per item. However, I cannot gaurantee this will not occur at some point. If this was the case, would concatenation be the best alternative - which would allow a vlookup to work as designed (since the column number would be known)? If this would be the case, I would need to understand how to concatenate prior to running the lookup (from outside the source file).