Forum Discussion
Merged Cells with XLOOKUP Help
Whether or not a viable solution could be found that could make your XLOOKUP function work, you really should be talking with whoever "owns" that table itself. It's a very badly designed table--and will continue to give you and others problems if you try to use it in its current state.
Quite seriously, it's designed for humans to look at rather than for computers to use, for Excel (and other programs to make use of). It's a common mistake, but a real one, because--as you're finding out first hand--it interferes with Excel's excellent abilities to retrieve data from tables. It's not bad to create spreadsheets that look nice, but that effort should be saved for output sheets, not raw data at the input end of things.
- Oh trust me I know how awful this is.. The overall design is meant to be used for a program, but I need specific data and this is the only thing I have 'clearance' for to find what I need without going through hoops.
Oh trust me I know how awful this is..
The overall design is meant to be used for a program, but I need...
But does the person who created it, who owns it, know how awful it is? Could the other purpose(s) not be served by a cleaner design? Have you tried to get its awfulness addressed? Would the fact that "experts from the Microsoft Excel forum" have denounced the design carry any weight?
Painful, for sure.
