Office Expert

VLOOKUP 

Sometimes you may come up with situations to lookup the data in a same  work sheet or  different work sheet or sometimes even from a different work book .

The Most common lookup function is the VLOOKUP [Vertical Lookup].

Excel VLOOKUP is one of the most useful function, and unfortunately it’s also one of the least understood. Here I will explain  how to use Vlookup with some simple examples .

The given is the list of items our company sells

In this example I have mentioned  only 4 items .But in real situations you might have 1000’s of different items.

Now here is a situation where we just know only  the Item code and we want to know what is the Item name .

so in this  situation we can use Vlookup function

Steps

1 .Select Vlookup function from Lookup & Reference in "Formulas"

2. Click On VLookup function

3.Select all the Values mentioned in the Table 

      Here Lookup value is the Item Code . Which is coming in the A11 Cell 
      
     Table_Array -Is the Reference Table which we are looking for the Item .So we need to select the entire table [Table Name -List Of Items]
     
    Col_Index_num - Is the Column number in the table -array from which the matching value should be returned .Here Col_Index_num is "2" ,where the item name is given.

  Range Lookup -Is a Logical Value .For Exact match we should use FALSE or 0 And for approx match we should use TRUE or 1 

4 Click On OK 

We will get the following result 

This is a simple example for Vlookup function and in the coming blog we will see some complex situvations where we can use the Vlookup function