All articles with 'MATCH()' Tag

Think of XLOOKUP as an improved version of VLOOKUP. In this article, learn all about the XLOOKUP function, it’s syntax, parameters with real-world xlookup examples.

VLOOKUP may not make you tall, rich and famous, but learning it can certainly give you wings. It makes you to connect two different tabular lists and saves a ton of time. In my opinion understanding VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH worksheet formulas can transform you from normal excel user to a data processing beast. Today, […]

Excel formula to get a match from a given value in excel when you have start and end values in lookup table. This technique is useful for looking up a matching price from a pricing tier table or date in a range of start and end dates.

Time for another homework. You got a spreadsheet of department budgets and need to write a formula to get budget for a given department, month combination.

Do you run an e-commerce website? You are going to love this simple, clear and easy website metrics dashboard. You can track 15 metrics (KPIs) and visualize their performance. The best part, it takes no more than 15 minutes to setup and use. Here is a preview of the dashboard.

Click to download the template.

Howdy folks. Almost the end of August here. Let’s wrap it up with a nice little challenge, inspired from my recent consulting gig. Say you are looking at few job titles that look similar and want to match them to correct title.

This is part of our Excel Interview Questions series.

VLOOKUP or INDEX+MATCH? When you should use each function and why?

This is such a great question to ask in interviews. So in my first installment of Excel interview questions, let me answer it.

We all know that VLOOKUP can find first match and return the results. But what if you want all the matches? Use this simple trick instead.

We all know VLOOKUP (or INDEX+MATCH) as an indispensable tool in our Excel toolbox. But what if you want the lookups to be a little gentler, nicer and relaxed?

Let’s say you want to lookup the amount $330.50 against a list of payments. There is no exact match, but if we look 50 cents in either direction, then we can find a match. Here is a demo of what I mean.

Unfortunately, you can’t convince VLOOKUP to act nice.

Hey VLOOKUP, I know you are awesome and all, but can you cut me some slack here? 

VLOOKUP is tough, reliable and has a cold heart. Or is it?

In this post, let’s learn how to do lenient lookups.

Ever wanted to make a cool, snazzy interactive chart in Excel? Something like this:

In this tutorial, learn all about making your very first interactive chart. We use both formulas and pivot tables to build two versions of an awesome interactive chart in Excel.

Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig. 

If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.

Game for some charting awesomeness?

Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.

Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?

How about the one above?

Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.

In this amazing guest post, the winner of our 2016 dashboard contest – Chandeep – Explains how he constructed the jaw dropping beauty (shown above) using Excel, creativity, love and sweat. Grab a full cup of coffee (or whatever liquid fancies you) and read on. Take lots of notes and play with the ideas in Excel while reading to maximize your learning.

Thanks Chandeep.

Let’s say you have some employee data in employee name, manager name format. But the data is all in one column, with odd rows containing employee names & even rows containing manager names. Something like above.

And you want to find out who is the boss for a given employee. Say, “Andrea Nichols”.

Your regular MATCH() formula for Andrea over the data range returns wrong answer as it will find first occurrence of Andrea (which in this case happens to be on even row, hence a manager record).

So how would you write the lookup formula?

Pivot tables are lovely. But sometimes they are hard to work with. Let’s say you are analyzing some HR data and want to see number of weeks worked in each hour classification.

And you want this.

Except, there is a teeny tiny problem.

The sort order on the classification is all messed up.

Here is a quick fix to get custom sort order on your pivot table row labels.