New smart tags added

[Guest]

I've received help here with a VLOOKUP question and it's worked great for me
so far... Thanks Max!

New question. In the current VLOOKUP that I'm doing, one of my source files
has the little green corners on the cells that tell you that numbers are
stored as text.

In the second source file, the cells are formatted to show as numbers stored
as text, but the green corners are not there.

I'm getting a lot of "no matches found" and I discovered that if I go to the
second source file, double click on the cell like I am going to edit it, hit
enter and move on, the corner is there all of a sudden and the VLOOKUP
formula works.

Is there any way to make those show up without clicking on each and every
one of them?

Thanks again in advance to anyone that might be able to help!

 

[Dave Peterson]

I don't think the problem is with those warning thingamajigs.

I think you should change your data to be consistent.

If you have numbers stored as text and want them to be real numbers, you can:
select an empty cell
edit|copy
select the range of text numbers
edit|paste special|check Add

If you have numbers stored as numbers and you want them to be text, you can:

Insert an adjacent column and use a formula:
=a1&""
or
=text(a1,"000000")
(if you need leading 0's)

After you copy the formulas down the column, you can
select those formula cells
edit|copy
select the original data
edit|paste special|values
and remove that helper column (it's served its purpose).