Hey Excel IT Pros,

I am trying to clean up a workbook analysis created by someone else. It's slow, it's large, it's not very good.

My question is a VLOOKUP performance question... Right now there are about 10-15 thousand VLOOKUPs on alpha numeric text like this:

10001110Philippines

I've brought in the corresponding ID's for the Regions, concatenated, then in a separate column formatted them as numeric ending up with something like this:

10001110118

 When performing VLOOKUP on such a high scale, will it make a large performance difference using alphanumeric vs. numeric? Should I switch over to INDEX/MATCH method?

Thanks for any advice,

best,

cp  

• Edited by determinism 11 hours 59 minutes ago

Also in terms of just storing worksheet data, it looks like a numeric formatted as a number like

10001110118

takes up much less space than something formatted as text like:

10001110Philipines

Any truth to this?