VLOOKUP function
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Use VLOOKUP when you need to find things in a table
or a range by row. For example, look up a price of an
automotive part by the part number, or find an
employee name based on their employee ID.
Tip: Check out these YouTube videos from Excel community experts for more help with VLOOKUP!
In its simplest form, the VLOOKUP function says:
=VLOOKUP(What you want to look up, where you want
to look for it, the column number in the range
containing the value to return, return an Approximate
or Exact match – indicated as 1/TRUE, or 0/FALSE).
Tip: The secret to VLOOKUP is to organize your data so that the value you look up (Fruit) is to the
left of the return value (Amount) you want to find.
Technical details
How to get started
There are four pieces of information that you will need
in order to build the VLOOKUP syntax:
1. The value you want to look up, also called the
lookup value.
2. The range where the lookup value is located.
Remember that the lookup value should always be in
the first column in the range for VLOOKUP to work
correctly. For example, if your lookup value is in cell C2
then your range should start with C.
3. The column number in the range that contains the
return value. For example, if you specify B2:D11 as the
range, you should count B as the first column, C as the
second, and so on.
4. Optionally, you can specify TRUE if you want an
approximate match or FALSE if you want an exact
match of the return value. If you don't specify anything,
the default value will always be TRUE or approximate
match.
Now put all of the above together as follows:
=VLOOKUP(lookup value, range containing the lookup
value, the column number in the range containing the
return value, Approximate match (TRUE) or Exact match
(FALSE)).
Examples
Here are a few examples of VLOOKUP:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5