Pulling data from big excel datatable with incremental column in Vlookup or IndexMatch without zeros

Question

I am trying for a while to pull data for around 160 metrics for the last imported date and previous one so I can automate some stuff.

This is how my datatable looks

Answer 1

If you are sure that you only return numbers or empty cells, this would prevent a double lookup:

=IFERROR(VALUE(A1&" "),"")

In your case, substitute A1 with VLOOKUP($C$3,Table1[#All],2, FALSE)

Answer 2

If you are returning a text based result, you can append a zero-length string to the VLOOKUP function.

=VLOOKUP($C$3,Table1[#All],2, FALSE)&""

This will not alter the string returned but will not show a zero when the return value would be blank.

If you are returning numbers or dates then you have to check if the return value is blank.

=IF(LEN(VLOOKUP($C$3,Table1[#All],2, FALSE)), VLOOKUP($C$3,Table1[#All],2, FALSE), "")

Unfortunately, this is a double lookup much as we had to do to check for errors before the IFERROR function came along but so far, there is no native worksheet IFBLANK function.

A UDF IFBLANK could be easily written.