title: Exact case matching with excel vlookups
body: <p>I have a spreadsheet which contains 'unique' IDs. The problem is that they are only case sensitive unique, meaning that I have: a06D000000QO5uW &amp; a06D000000QO5uw.</p>
  
  <p>I want to perform a vlookup on these IDs and pull back a related value. It's possible to do case sensitive matching using this article I found:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214264" rel="nofollow">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214264</a></p>
  
  <p>The problem I have found is that because the vlookup is nested within the Exact function, it returns the first match it finds, which may not be the one I am after. If I use the data sample from the article, it looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Name    Age     Joe
  Mary    32  
  joe     48  
  Bob     53  
  Sue     27  
  Joe     30  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and the look up looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>=IF(EXACT(C1,VLOOKUP(C1,A1:B6,1,FALSE))=TRUE,VLOOKUP(C1,A1:B6,2,FALSE),"No exact match")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem seems to be that the vlookup to test "Joe" comes across "joe" first of all and because it isn't case sensitive returns that as a match - meaning it never gets to "Joe". The exact function then fails because it is trying to test "Joe" against "joe".</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way around this? I really wanted to avoid going down the VBA route because we have a mix of Mac and Window users and so I wanted to keep it to formulas.</p>