In this case, it is the cell containing the word "Bananas." We begin by typing the formula "=VLOOKUP(" and then selecting the cell containing the data to be looked up. This step instructs Excel on what to look for. Second step is to instruct the function to perform a lookup This is a significant disadvantage of VLOOKUP, and it is strongly recommended that you use INDEX MATCH instead. As you can see in the "bad table" example, there is an error message because the columns are not in the correct order. To use the VLOOKUP function effectively, the first step is to ensure that your data is well organized and suitable for the function.īecause VLOOKUP operates in a left-to-right direction, you must ensure that the information you wish to look up is to the left of the data you wish to extract.Īs demonstrated in the preceding VLOOKUP example, the "good table" can easily execute the function to look up "Bananas" and return their price, as Bananas are located in the leftmost column. TRUE – Approximate match if no exact match is found, the closest match below the lookup value is used.įALSE – Exact match if an exact match is not found, an error is returned. The argument may be set to TRUE or FALSE, indicating the following: Range_lookup (optional argument) – This parameter specifies what this function should return if it cannot find an exact match for the lookup value. Col_index_num (required argument) – This is an integer indicating the column number of the supplied table array from which you wish to retrieve a value.Ĥ. The VLOOKUP function performs a search in the array's left-most column.ģ. Table_array (required argument) – The table array contains the data to be searched. Lookup_value (required argument) – Lookup value specifies the value in the first column of a table that we want to look up.Ģ.
The following arguments are passed to the VLOOKUP function:ġ. To put it simply, the formula is saying, "Look for this piece of information in the following area and provide me with the corresponding data from another column." =VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, ) In simple terms, the VLOOKUP function instructs Excel to "look for this piece of information (for example, bananas) in this data set (a table) and return some corresponding information about it (for example, the banana price"). In Excel, the VLOOKUP function is used to locate a specific piece of information within a table or data set and extract the corresponding data/information.
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