>>>Dragan,
>>>For such situations to be sure I precede them with a '
>>>Cetin
>>
>>Tried that in the meantime, and it won't do. The field contains the apostrophe, it's visible up there in the edit field, not visible in the cell, and the vlookup() function still returns the #N/A. It does so even with some values which don't originate from VFP, and we're clueless. Must be another Excel glitch. The only working solution is to paste it from a cell where it works.
>Dragan,
>Might it be that it's opened in a preformatted template and cell has a format that causes it not to show (ie:hidden) ?
>Cetin

Nope, it's a same old file we're using for months. All the cells are visible. It's just this column, whose value is supposed to be a string (but contains only digits in some cases), and whose value is used in the next column to vLookup() into the other sheet. The values which begin with an alpha show fine, but those which begin with a digit (and have digits only) sometimes work, and sometimes give the #N/A in the next column, without any apparent difference between teh cases when they work and when they don't.

I'll suggest we recode them all to begin with a letter and map this as an Excel bug.