Vlookup is skipping over some columns

[missnike]

Hello -

Help, please. Vlookup is skipping over some columns as though they don't exist. For instance, if I type in the following formula, =VLOOKUP(J2,$C$2:$G$6,3,FALSE), rather than getting what's in the third column, Vlookup returns what's in Column 10.

Has anyone encountered this before?

I checked the following:
- The cells between Columns 3 and 10 are not blank.
- The cells are all formatted the same way.

Please can anyone help me? An example of a table is pasted below. The first cell is Cell C2. I expected to get "Jill" as a return from the formula above (where J2 = Project 1). Instead, I got '3'.

Why did it skip over the columns that contain "Team A" or "3".

Any help will be appreciated!

Project List	Leaders	Team Members	Groups affected (Only dropdown options can be selected)	Number of people
Project 1	Doris	Jill	Team A	3
Project 2	James	Samantha	Team B	2
Project 3	Martha	Joe	Team C	6
Project 4	Avinash	Mark	Team D	10

<colgroup><col span="3"><col><col></colgroup><tbody>
</tbody>

 

[Ryeera]

Welcome to the forum!

If it did return '3' and not 'Project 3', then that is because you defined the third column of your search-matrix to be the returned value. That is in your case the Number of People and not the Team Members. Try using this formula: =VLOOKUP(J2,$C$2:$G$6,1,FALSE)

 

[missnike]

hello all. Thanks for your help. I now know why I thought it was returning the wrong number. The vlookup was reading a table that had both numbers and dates. It returned a number but the format of the displaying cell was accidentally set to "dates" so I thought it was returning the dates column instead! Thanks a lot for all your help! I'm OK now!!

Cheers!