Using the correct formulas

Hi Phoebe,

Thank you for your post and welcome to the forum;

By way of an answer I am going to include a couple of other bits and pieces, so it may be a bit long;

If you've been using Excel for a while, you have invariably found someone who talks about using INDEX() and MATCH() instead of VLOOKUP. Give me a couple of minutes and I will try to explain them in simple English.

First a 30 second review of VLOOKUP; Say you have a table of employee records. The first column is an employee number, and the remaining columns are various pieces of data about the employee. Any time you have an employee number in the worksheet, you can use VLOOKUP to return a specific datum about the employee. The syntax is VLOOKUP(value,data range,col no.,FALSE). It says to Excel, "Go to the data range. Find a row that has (value) in the first column of the data range. Return the (col no.) the value from that row.

When the key field is to the right of the data you want to retrieve, VLOOKUP will not work.

One common solution is to temporarily insert a new column A, copy the column of names to the new column A, populate with VLOOKUP, Paste Special Values, then delete the temporary column A.

This is now where your question comes into force; So, let me break it down into two pieces. First, there is the INDEX() function. This is a horribly named function. When someone says "index", it does not conjure up anything in my mind that is similar to what this function does. Index requires three arguments. =INDEX(data range, row number, column number).
In English; Excel goes to the data range and returns you the value in the intersection of the (row number) the row and the (column number) the column.
Hey, that