Head of Content, former FP&A Manager
Elena spent nine years in financial planning and analysis before moving into technical writing. She has closed more month-ends in Excel than she cares to count, and writes about the spreadsheet problems that survive every attempt to migrate off spreadsheets.
Nine times out of ten it is not the formula. It is an invisible character, a number stored as text, or an approximate match you never asked for.
XLOOKUP is better in almost every case. The exceptions are real, though, and worth knowing before you rewrite a model.