S1E3-VLOOKUP

Hi, welcome to the 3rd episode of Relax with Excel where you may learn something about Excel but will probably fall asleep.  Then again maybe you’ll learn in your sleep.  In this episode we’re going to cover the basics of VLOOKUP. 

VLOOKUP is one of the more well-known lookup functions in Excel.  Like most lookup functions, it’s used to find things in a table or range of data.  For VLOOKUP it is looking in a row and would return a result from that row depending on the column you choose.  For example, if you have a two-column table with column 1 as the Part Number and column 2 as the price you might want to use the VLOOKUP function to execute a lookup that returns the price when you type in the part number in another cell. 

Let's pretend we do have this situation and column A has over 100 unique part numbers going down the rows and column B has the prices for each  d might want to use column D as the area to do your lookup.  Cell D1 would have the Text “Part to Look up” and Cell D2 would have the title “Price”.  In cell D1 this is where you’d input any part number to be looked up.  

In cell D2, is where you’d write out the VLOOKUP function.  At its most basic, it would take three arguments or inputs: the value to lookup, the range where it would find the data to be looked up and the column number of that range where it would rind the value to return. There is a fourth argument, but if that’s omitted, it would default to TRUE. If you had part number 123 in row 500 and wanted to just type 123 in cell D1 of the lookup cell to get back the price, in cell D2 you would write the VLOOKUP function beginning with an equal sign then VLOOKUP, open parentheses, D1 for the cell that you had inputted 123 (or any other part number in the future).  That was the first argument. 

The 2nd argument is the range of data where the lookup table is.  You can select from A1 to B101 because that would have the range of data where part number is the first column and price is the second column.  OR if you could just type A1:B101. 

The third argument would be what column to bring back the value from.  Since price is the second column, you’d type the number 2 here.  You can just type a closing parenthesis here to complete the function. VLOOKUP would effectively look in the first column for the value of the aupart number 123 and go row by row to find it.  Once it finds it in row 500, it would move to the 2nd column bring back the price. 

And that is how a basic VLOOKUP function works.  When you have a large table with many columns and want to use a lookup function to quickly find column 5, 8 or column whatever value based on a lookup value, VLOOKUP is often one of the better tools to do this. 

That was a basic explanation of a VLOOKUP and how to use it in Excel.  If you’re still awake, thanks for getting this far. If you’re asleep, pleasant dreams.