How to Lookup Values to Left?
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 is the sales person 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.
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,…
Read more to find how to solve this.
Mix VLOOKUP with Data Validation for some magic! [VLOOKUP Week]
Situation
Sometimes we don’t know what we want. If this happens when I am in a bar, I usually order a cocktail. Just a mix of everything. The same will work in Excel too.
For eg. If you have lots of data, but the value you want to look up needs to change based on whims and fancies of your users, then you can resort to a cocktail. A mix of VLOOKUP with Drop down lists (Data validation)
Read more to find how to solve this.
Making VLOOKUP formulas go wild [VLOOKUP Week]
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?
Read more to find how to solve this.
VLOOKUP formula in excel with examples
I often tell my excel school students that learning VLOOKUP formulas will change your basic approach towards data. You will suddenly feel that you have discovered a superman cape in your attic. It is that awesome.
What does VLOOKUP really do?
Imagine you have a list of data and you want answer a question like, “How many sales did Josh make?”
VLOOKUP is one of the formulas you can use in this situation. VLOOKUP searches a list for a value in left most column and returns corresponding value from adjacent columns.
Celebrating the Lookup Formulas – VLOOKUP Week @ Chandoo.org
Hi all,
Few weeks back, I had a mild internet outage. Since I didn’t know what to do, I turned to you for help and asked you to share “VLOOKUP tips” while I get my connection back.
Oh boy!, the response to that has been overwhelming. More than 50 comments were posted, each with unique, fabulous uses of VLOOKUP & Other lookup formulas.
VLOOKUP is such an important formula that, I cannot imagine preparing a dashboard, report or any other data intensive workbook without using it a few times. So, to celebrate the versatility and usefulness of this beautiful formula (and other lookup formulas) we are going to call this as VLOOKUP week @ chandoo.org.