I have two pairs of columns, A/B and C/D. A and C are “artist” strings of artists and B and D are “year - album” strings. These contain mostly the same data but with some differences between the artist names (due to artist name changes or sloppy file organization) which causes misalignment along the entire sheet, and therefore I am trying to squash.
What I am trying to do is make a new column, E, which will take the album string from column D in a given row, look for a match in all the rows of column B, then pull the artist value A from that matching row and put it in column E in the given row.
But for some reason, LOOKUP(D#,B:B,A:A) is returning incorrect values (not errors, but simply the wrong answer). Here is a screenshot of an example. https://i.imgur.com/GKBlyY6.png
D537 contains “2015 - Link Up & Suede” which is present in column B but much farther down because the artist is listed as “NxWorries.” I’ve confirmed the text string is the same with copy/paste and find. However for some reason the search through B:B is is matching to a random album from much earlier in the sheet with no apparent overlap with the search criterion.