Lookup from other spreadsheet - but must search other spreadsheet

Hi all!
Thanks for your help in advance,

I have a small problem with a lookup I am doing currently.
I have 3 spreadsheets. 1 is the master which pulls it all together and the other 2 are spreadsheets provided by colleagues.
I have a list of items on my spreadsheet and need to pull some dates from the other spreadsheets from specific columns. However it is not as simple as a VLookup as the item list in the other 2 spreadsheets are not going to be necessarily in the same order as mine.

so is there anyway that there is a lookup way of searching for the item name in my master sheet, then looking in the other spreadsheet for the item name, then fetching the date given in that spreadsheet on that items row then inserting that value back into my master first spreadsheet where it should?

Is this a simple operation that can be done by function or is it going to require macro - the data will range to over 250 rows notably + I will be able to supply the data with regards column and row numbers hopefully in a few days - just a case of is it possible at this stage?!

Many thanks as always!

Vlookup doesn't need the items to be in the same order... as long as there is an exact match..

try something like

=Vlookup(A2,If(Isnumber(Match(A2,Sheet2!A:A,0)),Sheet2!A:B,Sheet3!A:B),2,0)

This will look first for a match in column A of Sheet2, if there is a match it will pull corresponding item from column B of Sheet2, otherwise it will try do the same from sheet 3. If no matches found at all, an #N/A error is returned