vlookup and dates!

K

KneeDown2Up

Driving me mad!

I am trying to use a vlookup (to another sheet) that has dates from 2005/6 -
I need to match corresponding dates from this year to previous years, i.e.
1/3/07 in sheet 1 needs to return the data next to the corresponding date in
the previous year's column(2).

Column D (sheet 2)
Dates

Column E (sheet 2)
Values

Column A Sheet 1
Dates

Column B sheet 1
Values

Column E sheet 1

Vlookup formula.

I have tried various permeatations of formula to no avail, such as
Vlooup(left(a3),left(mar06),2)

It doesn't seem to like the Left function. I've also tried the DAY function,
also to no avail.

Thanks for any pointers.

Martin
 
S

Stefi

Try to use this formula as search value (1st argument) in VLOOKUP:
=DATE(YEAR(A1)-1,MONTH(A1),DAY(A1))

Regards,
Stefi

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K

KneeDown2Up

Many thanks for getting back to me Stefi. The formula works on its own fine,
but when I put it within the vlookup statement it returns a "Ref#" error.

This is what I have;

=VLOOKUP(DATE(YEAR(A3)-1,MONTH(A3),DAY(A3)),mar06,2)

mar06 being a named list which has the equivelant dates. The cells are all
formatted as dates and the list is in ascending order.

Is there something I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks
 
P

Pete_UK

You are trying to retrieve data from the second column of the named
range mar06 - is this defined as being 2 columns wide?

Hope this helps.

Pete
 
K

KneeDown2Up

Ok, panic over - sorted! I had exported a (huge) list of data from another
application into the spreadsheet. It turns out (and thanks to Stefi, I came
across it) that the dates weren't changing when I tried formatting them into
reverse order, i.e. 2007,03,01. Why they are like that is beyond me and why I
can't change their formatting is annoying! I now have to manually change all
the dates to enable this to work! (pc's and time eh?!!)

Thanks again Stefi, it works great now.
 
K

KneeDown2Up

Thanks Pete - yes the list is 2 columns wide - all working now - see previous
post.
 
S

Stefi

If you post the format of your date cells and how they exactly look like,
we'll probably find a method to avoid manual manipulation of a huge amount of
data.
Stefi


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