VLOOKUP returns #N/A although match exists (=A1=B1 == "TRUE")

Question

I use Google Analytics API to export some data into Excel. Because the API have limits with the number of dimensions and metrics that can be exported at the same time, I have to make this export usind different queries, which are placed into different sheets.

I want to consolidate all this information in just one sheet, so I create (in every sheet) an unique ID with some shared values of each sheet (using concatenate) and do a VLOOKUP to consolidate the data of every sheet into the first sheet. It works like a charm for 99,5% of the data. But there are some IDs which are returning a #N/A, althought I have manually checked if they are exact matching using =B1='Sheet2'!B191, which returns TRUE.

I generate those Unique IDs with =CONCATENATE(TRIM(B1),TRIM(C1),TRIM(D1)...), so I do not believe there are blank spaces preventing the match. I have even pasted those IDs as "value" and I still get those #N/A.

I am not able to find a cause for this rare behaviour! Agustín

Answer 1

Non-printing characters may give rise to a number of issues, in this case these apparently were resolved by CLEAN:

Removes the first 32 nonprinting characters in the 7-bit ASCII code (values 0 through 31) from text.