Now look through this range of cells, and in the third column to the right, find the value on the same row.”
On this worksheet, I have a table that contains employee data, named Table1. So what just happened? I told Excel, “Here is a value in the left-hand column of my data. In this video, well look at how to use VLOOKUP to lookup values in an Excel Table. When I press Enter to tell Excel I am done, you can see I get an error message because I haven't entered a value in cell H2.īut, when I enter a part number, I get a price. In other words, it's the third column over from the part numbers, the data I know.Īnother comma, and I enter FALSE, because that gives me an exact match between part number and price.Īnd don't worry, I'll explain how that works later. This tells VLOOKUP that the values I want to see are in the third column from the left in the range of cells I want to search.
So, I'll enter B3, a colon, and E52, then I'll type another comma.Īnd you need to do that because the functions won't work without the colons and commas. The part numbers start in cell B3, and if I scroll down, you can see the status values end at cell E52. I'll enter H2 as the first argument, because that is where I'll type the part numbers.įollow that with a comma, and then, I'll enter the range of cells that contains the data I want to search. These parentheses will contain a set of arguments, and an argument is just a piece of data that the function needs in order to run. To do that, I'll click the cell where I want to see the Prices, I'll enter an = sign, VLOOKUP, and parentheses. In this case, it’s the cell that contains Bananas. We start by typing the formula VLOOKUP ( and then select the cell that contains the information we want to lookup. This can be an actual value, or a blank cell that will hold a value: (H2, Enter your table array or lookup table, the range of data you want to search, and a comma: (H2,B3:F25, Enter column index number. In this step, we tell Excel what to look for. So, as an example, I'll enter part numbers, the thing I know, and find out Prices, the thing I don't know. In the parentheses, enter your lookup value, followed by a comma. VLOOKUP works a lot like a phone book, where you start with the piece of data you know, like someone's name, in order to find out what you don't know, like their phone number. When you need to extract data from a table based on a particular value, you can use Vlookup to do that.Vlookup is one of the most. When you need to find information in a large spreadsheet, or you are always looking for the same kind of information, use the VLOOKUP function. Vlookup is one of the most popular look up functions in Excel.