A quick reminder to those who’ve used vlookups before but need a refresher.
A full post on vlookups is coming soon and there will be a link here in due course.
A VLOOKUP enables excel to travel down a desired column until it finds your chosen value and then go along that row to return a cell value in an adjacent column.
See the formula below that will scan column ‘A’ to find the words ‘Totally Cool’ and return what is in column ‘C’…
=VLOOKUP("Totally Cool",A:C,3,FALSE)
Notice the 4 inputs after the bracket separated by commas.
- The thing you are wanting to find
- The range of cells your VLOOKUP needs to cover (starting from the column ‘Totally Cool’ will be in and ending at least at the column you’re return value comes from)
- The number of columns to the right you need to travel to get your return value
- Using FALSE tells excel to bring back a result only it finds an exact match for ‘Totally Cool’. If you call use ‘TRUE’ excel will stop at the row with the closest match to ‘Totally Cool’