Excel VLOOKUP for beginners

VLOOKUP which stands for ‘Vertical Lookup’. This function in excel is used when we look for specific value in a column.

Here you will all think that why can’t we use filter ; so my simple answer will be –

Filter is good till we analyze in small data but when we have to deal with large dataset , it really become lit-bit difficult and time taking while doing manually looking for each value and tedious at the same time. To make our work interesting and fast VLOOPKUP is best.

Hope you got your answer that why you should know VLOOKUP. Now

Lets go

1. Here is a small dataset of salesperson or you can collect from Kaggle , data.world

2. Choose Function Argument(fx) and Select VLOOKUP.

If we want to see the Net sales of Tauseef by VLOOKUP-

Lookup_value: “Tauseef”

Table_array: B3:E16(Data range)

Col_index_num: 3(Net sales Column no)

Range_lookup: FALSE

Note- Here False means to find exact match where as TRUE or omitted means to get approximated answer and will be used when our dataset is sorted(ascending order).

Just change the name and do enter : you will get another salesperson net sales

3. If we want to get Net sales value by Name of Salesperson

Here, Lookup_value: H10 (cell location of Lisha)

And rest value will be same as above .

Now if we check for any salesperson whose data is not available then here #N/A will be shown

Or you can say VLOOKUP has not been able to find out what we are looking for.

To avoid such mistake or error we use; IFERROR FUNCTION

4. Another method in more simplified way —

By Creating table:

Select one cell of data and press Ctrl+T and then OK.

If you want to change table name –

Go to table design then change table name as shown below:

Lets take example , Now if we want to know the number of customers:

Lookup_value: H23 (Cell address of Nikita)

Table_array: Salesdata( table name )

Col_index_num: 2(Column no of ‘No.Customers’ )

Thankyou for reading this short tutorial and hope it will make you more curious to know more about uses of VLOOKUP in excel