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Making VLOOKUP formulas go wild [VLOOKUP Week]

  • Last updated on November 1, 2010
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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:

Data for this Example -Using Wildcards with VLOOKUP formula

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:

Data for this Example -Using Wildcards with VLOOKUP formula

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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VLOOKUP Week @ Chandoo.org - Learn tips on lookup formulas in Excel

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6 Responses to “Using Lookup Formulas with Excel Tables [Video]”

  1. Damian says:
    November 9, 2010 at 8:20 am

    H1 !
    this is my very first comment.
    Can you use same technique with Excel 2003 lists ?
    thanks 😀

    Reply
  2. Tom says:
    November 9, 2010 at 6:58 pm

    Thanks, Chandoo! I like seeing the sneak peak of what's to come on Friday too 🙂

    Reply
  3. Chandoo says:
    November 11, 2010 at 8:09 am

    @Damian.. Welcome to chandoo.org. Thanks for the comments.

    Yes, you can use the same with Excel 2003 lists too.

    @Tom.. You have seen future and its awesome.. isnt it?

    Reply
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  6. Q.fg says:
    May 4, 2015 at 8:36 pm

    Hi, is there a vlookup formula for the second example (IDlist)? I used a similar formula to look up the ID for the person, but the reverse way (look up the person with the ID) comes up N/A.

    Reply

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