It has been observed that the name VLOOKUP is very intimidating to the users and avoid to use it. But believe me, no function in Excel is as beautiful as this. Learning this function is very easy so let’s begin.
What exactly a VLOOKUP is?
VLOOKUP function is the right choice whenever we want to find a specific piece of information from our spreadsheet. E.g. if you have a list of all Countries with their capitals, you could search for a capital of a specific country.
Take a look at my other blogs - One of their own kind, The Space Ecstasy
(Source: https://www.countries-ofthe-world.com/capitals-of-the-world.html)
We are going to find the capital city of, let’s say, Argentina using VLOOKUP function. This look simple and you may have already find the capital city of Argentina because this is small and simple example but consider the case when your spreadsheet is having tons of data and you want to find something specific. Without the VLOOKUP function it would be like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.
Let’s dissect the VLOOKUP function. The VLOOKUP function is equipped four set of arguments.
Syntax
=VLOOKUP (value, table, col_index, [range_lookup])
Arguments
value - The value or the name of an item to look for in the first column of a table. If the value/item to be searched is string, it should be “double quoted”. In our case the value is Argentina.
=VLOOKUP(“Argentina”
table - The table from which to retrieve a value. Or we can say that a cell range from which we want to find our value/item. For our case, our data lies between cells A3 to B13 hence the range will be A3:B13.
=VLOOKUP(“Argentina”, A3:B13
col_index - The column in the table/cell range from which to retrieve a value/an item.
It is apparent that the first column in the range is A (Country) which index is 1. In our case, we want to retrieve the value from column B (Capital) which index is 2. Meaning, our third argument will be 2.
=VLOOKUP(“Argentina”, A3:B13, 2
range_lookup - [optional] TRUE = approximate match (default). FALSE = exact match. The fourth argument will tell the VLOOKUP function whether to look for an approximate match or an exact match. This argument can either be TRUE or FALSE. When the data of first column has numerals, which have been sorted in either way, the VLOOKUP function should look for an approximate match which means the fourth argument should be TRUE.
In our case, we’re looking for an exact match and hence our argument should be FALSE.
=VLOOKUP(“Argentina”, A3:B13, 2, FALSE)
And here we go! Paste above formula in any of the cell you want the result and hit Enter which will gives the result Buenos Aires.
 function&via=stc_network)
0 comments:
Post a Comment