This article is part of our VLOOKUP Week. Read more.
Situation
Often we need our lookup formulas to go wild. Not in the sense of go-wild-and-chomp-a-few-kilo-bytes-of-data sense. But wild like wild cards.
For eg. In the below data, we may not remember the full name of sales person, but we know that her name starts with jac. Now how do you get the sales amount for that person?
Data:
Solution
Simple. Use wild cards. Like this: =VLOOKUP("jac*",$B$5:$E$17,3,FALSE) to fetch the value from 3rd column for the person whose name starts with jac
Examples:
Sample File
Download Example File – Using Wild cards with VLOOKUP formula
Special Thanks to
Michael Pennington, Lukas for the tip. (Click on the name to see their tip)
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One Response to “How to compare two Excel sheets using VLOOKUP? [FREE Template]”
Maybe I missed it, but this method doesn't include data from James that isn't contained in Sara's data.
I added a new sheet, and named the ranges for Sara and James.
Maybe something like:
B2: =SORT(UNIQUE(VSTACK(SaraCust, JamesCust)))
C2: =XLOOKUP(B2#,SaraCust,SaraPaid,"Missing")
D2: =XLOOKUP(B2#,JamesCust, JamesPaid,"Missing")
E2: =IF(ISERROR(C2#+D2#),"Missing",IF(C2#=D2#,"Yes","No"))
Then we can still do similar conditional formatting. But this will pull in data missing from Sara's sheet as well.