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Situation

We know that VLOOKUP formula is useful to fetch the first matching item from a list. So what would you do if you need 2nd (or 3rd etc.) matching item from a list?

For eg. If you have below data, and you want to find out how much sales John made 2nd time, then VLOOKUP formula becomes quite useless. Or is it?!?

Read more to find how to solve this.

Situation

So far we have seen what VLOOKUP formula is and how to put it to some nifty uses. Today, we will go one step further and learn how to do 2 Way Lookups.

What is a 2 Way Lookup?

Lookup is when you find a value in one column and get the corresponding element from other columns. 2 Way Lookup is when you lookup value at the interesection corresponding to a given row & column values.

For example, assuming you have data like below, and you want to findout how much sales Joseph made in month of March, you are essentially doing a 2 way lookup.

Read more to find how to solve this.

Excel Tables, a newly introduced feature in Excel 2007 is a very powerful way to manage & work with tabular data. I really like tables feature and use it quite often. If you are new to tables, read up Introduction to Excel Tables.

In this short video tutorial I explain how to combine VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH formulas with Excel Tables.

SituationVLOOKUP 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? Read more to find how to solve this.

VLOOKUP (and other lookup formulas) are very powerful and quite practical. They can fetch you the information you are looking for from a heap of data.

Now that we have seen the power of VLOOKUP thru several posts this week, I want to test your understanding of these formulas by presenting 3 challenges. The challenges are, (1) Calculating amount payable after applying quantity discounts, (2) Calculating amount payable after applying accumulated quantity discounts, (3) Calculating unit price after finding the closest match.

Read the rest of this article to find the challenge details and 2 joke and 1 link 🙂

Ok, you have learned how to write vlookup formulas. You have also seen some pretty interesting examples of it (1, 2).

But how do you write better VLOOKUP formulas?

Here is a list of 6 tips that work wonders with VLOOKUP writing.

SituationNot always we want to lookup values based on one search parameter. For eg. Imagine you have data like below and you want to find how much sales Joseph made in January 2007 in North region for product “Fast car”? Read more to find how to solve this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have a quick announcement for you.

As you may know, I am running an Online Financial Modeling Training Program called as Financial Modeling School in collaboration with Pristine Education. We have opened registrations for first batch of this program on October 18th. Thank you very much for supporting this program wildly. In a few hours, I will be closing the registrations for Financial Modeling School.

Click here to sign up for Financial Modeling School

Learn how to create a birthday reminder worksheet in excel in this video post. You can also download a template to keep track of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries.

Analyzing competition is one of the key aspects of running a business. In this article, learn how to use Excel’s scatter plots to understand competition, like shown aside.

The inspiration for this comes from a recent article on Asymco analyzing mobile handset market (Apple iPhone, Nokia etc.) and how it has changed since 2007.

Read the rest of the post to learn how to create this type of chart in excel. Also, you can download the chart template. Go ahead.

Lets keep this quick and short, As some of you may know, There is a mega IPO (initial public offering) going on in India these days. It is for a company called Coal India Ltd. So my partners at Pristine Education thought, it would be cool to build a financial model analyzing the IPO. Click […]