Who can help me with a more powerful VLOOKUP?

[olive_into]

When I am using VLOOKUP, I want the background color of H4 to be set to yellow by VLOOKUP as well, in other words, I want VLOOKUP to copy both words and their formats.

I know VBA may help me to realize it, but it cannot be transferred across different books as easily as internal formulas. Is there a better way to do this?

[#2]

Olive,
There are no Excel functions that will do that. You could write a user function as I am sure you know. The alternative is to use conditional formatting based on the values you get from the Vlookup. If you used conditional formatting to set the colours in the lookup range you could ensure you have the same formats in both cells. Hope that makes sense

Rich