VLOOKUP - when you are looking for what is contained, not what is equal

The standard VLOOKUP is one of the most commonly used Excel formulas. If you've got a list of control values that are listed in a bigger table which includes other data associated with those control values, you can use VLOOKUP to pul data from the wider array adjacent your original set of control values. VLOOKUP can also be made to work if your control value is in a single cell with additional characters. See this variation:

=VLOOKUP("*"&A2&"*",Sheet1!C:D,2,FALSE)

So, in this example, if the value in A is mixed in column C with other data in a single cell, the formula will still know to pull the data from column D.

Thanks to AirFix for posting this at: http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/234406-vlookup-part-text-string.html