When you have a list of data and want to use things like Lookup functions with it, there can be a problem if some of the items have an extra space at the end. I recently received an email from someone who had this exact problem.
The worst thing about it is that it is hard to see the extra space but your lookups just don’t find the correct items. There is another function that you can use to get rid of trailing and leading spaces (spaces at the beginning and end of cells).
The function is called Trim. There are several of them but I am just going to show you Trim. It looks like this:
=Trim(cell)
So if the cell A3 has an extra space at the end I can put this into another cell, like cell B3 and would type:
=Trim(A3)
They would look the same but there would be no extra space at the end of the cell. If you wanted to use a lookup you could either insert a column in Column A or start your lookup table at Column B.
Katherine