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Jennifer Corcoran's avatar
Jennifer Corcoran
Former Employee
Nov 09, 2018
Solved

#SPILL! Error when doing VLOOKUP?

I just updated my Office 365 (Mac) with the latest Excel updates yesterday and for some reason can no longer do a standard vlookup formula. The results in the cell where I"m trying to do lookup, retu...
Excel on Mac
Formulas and Functions
office 365
  • JoeMcDaid's avatar
    JoeMcDaid
    Jul 31, 2019

    Hi Jennifer Corcoran ,

     

    This is likely because your VLOOKUP is looking up multiple values in the first argument (the red text below).

     

    =VLOOKUP(A:A,B:B,1,FALSE)

     

    By looking up A:A you are asking Excel to lookup a million cells. In the past this worked because Excel didn't know how to lookup multiple values, so it threw all but one away. This behaviour was called "implicit intersection". With the introduction of Dynamic Arrays, Excel now supports looking up multiple values and no longer does implicit intersection silently. If there isn't enough space to return the values you will see the #SPILL error. 

     

    To modify your formula to return just a single value, you can use one of the following techniques:

     

    1. Modify you formula to use the new implicit intersection operator @ to select one lookup value. =VLOOKUP(@A:A,B:B,1,FALSE)

    2. Simply reference a single cell and copy down. =VLOOKUP(A2,B:B,1,FALSE) 

     

    Both work but my preferred option is 2 as it is the simplest. 

     

    Regards, Joe [Excel Team]

     

Ljohnson329's avatar
Ljohnson329
Former Employee
May 28, 2019
I am having the same issue but on a PC, recent update. I was not able to use the below recommendation, as it did not provide any useful guidance. Help, I use VLook-up all the time and this is creating work stoppage!! Please let me know if you have learned of any other suggestions to fix the Spill error.
Thank you!
  • utkarsh0103's avatar
    utkarsh0103
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 14, 2019

    Ljohnson329 

    Experiencing the same issue. And not able to find the reason behind that and also not able to get the solution anywhere.

    • Brad_Yundt's avatar
      Brad_Yundt
      MVP
      Jul 14, 2019

      utkarsh0103 

      Please post a workbook that demonstrates the problem. If the problem is reproduced at my end (I have multiple versions of Mac and Windows Excel), I can either suggest a workaround & explanation, or else report it to Microsoft developers as a bug.

      • saurajyoti's avatar
        saurajyoti
        Copper Contributor
        Jul 25, 2019
        Brad_Yundt , I am getting the same error. Would appreciate some help but cannot find an option to upload the workbook here.

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