VLOOKUP - "A value is not available to the formula or function" error

AnnoyedEditor

New Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2022
Messages
1
Office Version
  1. 365
Platform
  1. Windows
I have a workbook with two sheets. On the "Likes" sheet, I have a list of URLs (and other things that are not relevant here). The second sheet, "Apr-4.13.22", has topic titles and their URLs. I want to pull the topic titles from "Apr-4.13.22" into the "Likes" sheet. The formula I attempted to use was =VLOOKUP(A2,'Apr-4.13.22'!A:D,1,FALSE) but I received the "Value Not Available" error (tooltip: "A value is not available to the formula or function"). I have confirmed that the value (the URL) is present on the "Apr-4.13.22" sheet.

The URLs are in the first column of my "Likes" sheet. The topic titles are in the first column of the "Apr-4.13.22" sheet, and the URLs are in the second column. I need to pull topic names based on the URL because multiple topics have the same name but different URLs. No URLs are repeats.

Things I tried to fix this that didn't work: I've attempted to shorten the URLs in case they are too long. I attempted removing all the slashes in the URLs. I added a column before the topic name column and updated 1 to 2. I changed A:D to A:Z (just in case). I changed the URL for one row to "fubar" on both sheets. Then, I changed FALSE to TRUE and a topic title was returned; it was the wrong one, though. I restored to an earlier version of my spreadsheet in case it was a bug. I attempted to use MATCH and INDEX combined instead, but I don't know enough about either to make a functional formula. (My non-functional formula was =INDEX('Apr-4.13.22'A;A,MATCH(A3,B:B,0)) if it makes a difference/you want a laugh.)

Not sure if it's relevant, but I formerly had the "Likes" sheet set up to pull the URL from the "Apr-4.13.22" sheet using the topic name, and that pulled the URLs just fine (though there were some that were repeated due to the repeat topic names issue). The formula I used was =VLOOKUP(A2,'Apr-4.13.22'!A:D,2,FALSE) with the first column being the topic titles.

What am I doing wrong, or should I be taking a different approach entirely? Thank you.
 

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    Apr-4.13.22-Sheet.PNG
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    Likes-Sheet.PNG
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You almost had it with INDEX and MATCH, it should have been
Excel Formula:
=INDEX('Apr-4.13.22'!A:A,MATCH(A3,'Apr-4.13.22'!B:B,0))
You could use XLOOKUP if your version of excel has it, but VLOOKUP is not suitable for the task. VLOOKUP requires that the column to be matched is the leftmost column, not the second column as in your example.
 
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