I am attempting to read a lookup value from another spreadsheet. I have a
spread sheet, test.xls which contains string data in column A and numeric
data in column B. I reference that spreadsheet in another spreadsheet,
test1.xls. I want to lookup up the numeric values in test.xls which
correspond to the string values contained in test1.xls.

My formula looks like this:

=VLOOKUP($A1,[test.xls]Sheet1!A1:A100,[test.xls]Sheet1!B1:B100)

I get an error: #REF.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any help.