Match or VLOOKUP

[Krish]

I am struggling with this and I am sure someone could help me. I have a
spreadsheet with account number and description in two columns. This is a
master Chart of Accounts. The account numbers are 8 digits. In the same
spreadsheet, another worksheet has account number and description of the
account. The account numbers are 4 digits in this worksheet. Further the
account numbers have no relationship to the master, meaning the master
worksheet could have account 35110001 and the other worksheet will have 3429
with the same description as "Fees". Therefore my only choice is to use
either VLOOKUP or MATCH (exact) for the description in both worksheets.
However I get #NA as the result. But if I copy "Fees" from Master worksheet
and paste to the other worksheet containing the same description "Fees",
then the formula finds a match. I have 1985 rows to play with. Is there a
simple solution?
Thank you so much for your help.
Krish

 

[Pete_UK]

You might have extra spaces in some of the descriptions - as you can't
see these the entries might look the same, but to Excel they are not.
You can apply the TRIM( ) function to both sets of descriptions in a
helper column to get rid of extra spaces and then fix the values with
paste special, and copy them back over the original entries. This
should improve things for you.

Hope this helps.

Pete