Situation
VLOOKUP is great for extracting information from a huge data table based on what you are looking for. But what if you need to extract more than one column of information? For eg. Lets say you have salesperson’s name in left most column, and monthly sales figures in next columns, one for each month. Now, you want to find the total sales made by a given sales person. How do you go about it?
Data:
![Data for this Example -Get Multiple Outputs [VLOOKUP Quick Tip]](https://chandoo.org/img/f/vw/vloookup-from-multiple-columns-data.png)
Solution
Simple. You can use an array in the column number field of VLOOKUP. So for eg. =SUM(VLOOKUP(value, list, {2,3,4},false)) will give you sum of values in columns 2,3 and 4. Of course you must press CTRL+SHIFT+Enter after typing the formula. See few more examples:
Examples:
![Data for this Example -Get Multiple Outputs [VLOOKUP Quick Tip]](https://chandoo.org/img/f/vw/vlookup-multi-column-examples.png)
Sample File
Download Example File – Get Multiple Outputs [VLOOKUP Quick Tip]
Special Thanks to
John for the tip. (Click on the name to see tip)














5 Responses to “Preparing Profit / Loss Pivot Reports [Part 2 of 6]”
[...] Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet [...]
[...] Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet [...]
[...] Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet [...]
I am not getting sound from the videos. I have checked all the settings and spent several hours searching the Internet to no avail.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to get the Grand Total to be broken out in the same fashion as the items above it? For instance, if you have in column 1, widget a, widget b, and have their sales by month in column 2, I'd like to see the grand total also be by month, for widget a & b combined.
I can't get anything other than a single line for the grand total, rather than the same format as the data above.
Widget A Month Sales
Jan 100
Feb 200
Widget B
Jan 150
Feb 250
Grand total - here I would also like to have Jan, Feb.
Jan 250
Feb 450