All articles with 'vlookup' Tag

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.

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.

First some personal matters. Today I am celebrating my 28th birthday. The last one year has been very good for us. We have been very busy parenting 2 hilarious and naughty twins, I moved back to India, quit my job and started a company. My business became a mild success crossing $100k revenues in 12 […]

Hello Folks.

I have a rather bad news for you. My internet service provider (TATA Photon) has mysteriously blocked chandoo.org. My site hasn’t been loading since Sunday. While, I know it is up and running, I cannot see it unless I go thru a proxy server.

It may take a few days to get this resolved. I am using this time to take a break from blogging and finish reading a few books.

But I have a contest for you that will keep you busy. Share your favorite VLOOKUP tip / trick and you can win an iPod Nano. Read more for rules & how to participate.

Last week I announced Reader Awesomeness Week to celebrate the passion, attitude and knowledge of our little community here. I got 9 interesting and beautiful entries from our readers. In this post you can see 9 tips & downloads submitted by our readers. These include a project management template, a macro to remove blanks, a technique to make Google Earth maps using Excel and several other interesting tips & tricks.

Go ahead and read them, download attached workbooks and become awesome in Excel. 🙂