VBA Run-time Error 1004 for Special Characters in Soft-coded Vlookup Function

Question

When I was trying to throw a vertical bar "|" into my vlookup function, I got a 1004 error. I am not sure where it came from.

Initially the data table looks like this:

And my code was like this:

Sheets("Sheet 1").Cells(i, 2).Formula = "=VLOOKUP($A" & i & ",Data!$A$1:$B$" & LastRow & "," & ColmNum & ",0)"

Everything worked fine till the format of the data table got changed to:

So I had to throw the vertical bar "|" into my code. My new code was like this:

NewKey = Sheets("Sheet 1").Cells(i, 1).Value & "|" & Sheets("Data").Cells(i, 2).Value
Sheets("Sheet 1").Cells(i, 3).Formula = "=VLOOKUP(" & NewKey & ",Data!$A$1:$B$" & LastRow & "," & ColmNum & ",0)"

Apparently Excel 2010 did not like my codes and threw me a 1004 error. I am wondering if anyone knows a solution to this. Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

NewKey needs to be in quotes when the formula is placed on the sheet, so you need to include the quotes in the string:

NewKey = Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(i, 1).Value & "|" & Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(i, 2).Value
Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(i, 3).Formula = "=VLOOKUP(""" & NewKey & """,Data!$A$1:$B$" & LastRow & "," & ColmNum & ",0)"