Situation
There is no argument that VLOOKUP is a beautiful & useful formula. But it suffers from one nagging limitation. It cannot go left.
Let me explain, Imagine you have data like below. Now, if you want to find-out who made $2,133 in sales, there is no way VLOOKUP can come to rescue. This is because, once you search a list using VLOOKUP, you can only return corresponding items from the column at right, not at left.
Data:
One easy fix would be move the sales data to the left of person name. But this is an annoying fix, because, god knows you may want to lookup based on profit values or something else in future. A better alternative is,…
Solution
.., to use a formula combination called INDEX + MATCH (or OFFSET + MATCH would work too).
The basic syntax of this combination is like this: =INDEX(column with data you want,MATCH(value you are looking for, column which contains this data,0)). So, for eg: =INDEX($B$5:$B$17,MATCH(1088,$D$5:$D$17,0)) would find the position of 1088 in list D5:D17 and return corresponding element from B5:B17 (ie the value from left). See more examples below.
Examples:
Sample File
Download Example File – Make VLOOKUP go Left
Go ahead and download the file. It also has some homework for you to practice this formula trick.
Special Thanks to
Prem, Rohit1409, John, Godzilla, Chris Byham, judgepax – Please click on their names to learn even more.
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How do i create a chart that has negative numbers on axis x and y and plot them correctly? I cannot seem to understand how to do this, please help.
Thanks.
Nat
You can also plot 2 or more Y axes in Excel using EZplot or Multy_Y from Office Expander.com
There is a demo version to try.
Cheers.