Joining Tables with Index and Match for cell content with >256 characters

[yeasayer]

Hi there,

I apologise in advance if this is a simple question (I just spent an hour searching the internet and didn't find a solution that i) I understood or b) worked.) I'm very new to Excel, this is my problem.

I'm looking to match demographic attributes to survey responses based on two tables (Sheet 1 where I am trying to build one big table; Sheet 2 "Female Answers" which contains only survey responses by female dem; the common ID for both tables are survey-responses themselves (in written text, often with more than 256 characters). This is what I used so far:

=INDEX('Female Answers'!$A$2:$B$2203,MATCH($C2,'Female Answers'!$B$2:$B$2203,0),2)



( "2"= column with the relevant attribute, i.e. "F".)

This function seems to work for responses that are < 256 characters, but I get a "#VALUE!" error for longer ones.

Question: Is there a workaround for this issue or a modification I could use for the formula above? (I've read that one can try to match content based on only looking at the first 256 characters in a cell via LEFT(), but I haven't gotten that to work yet.)

Thanks for bearing with me here.

Best wishes,
Yeasayer