Trying VLOOKUP ActiveX Combolist value

[ike_barrett]

So I have database that has an employee table/sheet "Employees" with three columns...EmployeeID, FirstName, LastName. Most of the data only uses EmployeeID...but I don't want users to have to remember employee IDs when using it.

So, I use an ActiveX ComboBox to display the three columns and transmt the value to the linkedCell (in this case C3). The value shows correctly.

Then I try to show the names in D3 and E3, but keep getting #NA .

I used =INDEX(Employees,MATCH(C3,Employees[Employee_ID],0),2)

If I simply replace C3 with my employeeID number it works...also, if I change my employeeIDs to letters instead of numbers it works...but I can't do that.

I also tried substituting C3 with Indirect("C3") and that doesn't work (although it does work else where to display the EmployeeID).

Any direction you can provide would be great.

 

[Yongle]

Your formula works fine for me provided

EITHER
BOTH values are text

Excel 2016 (Windows) 32 bit

	C​	D​
3​	12345
4​	joe	=INDEX(Employees,MATCH(C3,Employees[Employee_ID],0),2)

Sheet: Sheet8

Excel 2016 (Windows) 32 bit

	A​	B​	C​
1​	Employee_ID	First Name	Last Name
2​	12345	joe	Brown
3​	23456​	peter	Smith
4​	34567​	jenny	Silvers

Sheet: Employees

OR
BOTH values are numbers

Excel 2016 (Windows) 32 bit

	C​	D​
3​	12345​
4​	joe	=INDEX(Employees,MATCH(C3,Employees[Employee_ID],0),2)

Sheet: Sheet8

Excel 2016 (Windows) 32 bit

	A​	B​	C​
1​	Employee_ID	First Name	Last Name
2​	12345​	joe	Brown
3​	23456​	peter	Smith
4​	34567​	jenny	Silvers

Sheet: Employees

Where is the mismatch?
You say that "If I simply replace C3 with my employeeID number it works"
- so I think that the problem is in C3 rather than the table

Try this simple formula
=T(C3)

It returns nothing if the cell contains a number and returns 12345 (in above example) if cell contains text

If I am correct then your formual can be changed to
=INDEX(Employees,MATCH(VALUE(C3),Employees[Employee_ID],0),2)