Index Match function

[jackzha]

Hi Everyone,

Part of my job needs me to do Index/Match function constantly, and I ran into the following tricky situation, which hopefully can be solved by all the good people on this forum.



specifically, I need to exactly match two text strings from two Excel sheets. For some items, we have different tail codes to identify their different status.

For example, "abc?" means "abc to be sorted", and "abc-" means "finished abc".

The problem is, the excel won't recognize the difference between "abc?" and "abc-". According to Excel, the two are exactly the same, whoever is the first to be found in a array, got chosen by the Match function.

So when I need to match "abc?", the Match function returns values for "abc-", because it got found in the array first.

Anybody can help?

Thanks a ton in advance,

Jack