Excel messes my data up

[Sirritys]

Hi,

I am trying to run vlookup for about 5K cells from range of 20k cells.
Now the problem is that some of the cells include only numbers and some
both numbers and letters, like AB11002.

I also have empty spaces on the data so I have to run trim on both data
before running vlookup. Just after trimming both data vlookup runs
correctly, but if I "touch" any cell containing only numbers excel
propably converts it to number and at this point excel don't think
those two cells that before was equal are equal any more.

So how in the earth I could convert my mixed data in the format excel
wouldn't automatically mess up?


Regards,
Sirritys

 

[Sirritys]

Allready found an answer:

I'll 1st trim both data and then use macro to re-enter all the fields
from both ranges.

This way they should both be formatted in same way and VLOOKUP should
work.

-Sirritys