excel.training.course.london - Sorting Data

Hi Sophie

Thank you for your question, and apologies for the delay in replying.

The idea of VLOOKUP is that you can get Excel to look for a value in the left most column of a table of data; and display a corresponding value in the same row of the table.

The value that Excel looks for in the left most column is called the lookup value.

The entire table/data area is called the table array.

Each column in the table array is assigned a number by Excel - the column containing the possible lookup values is column 1, then each of the other columns in the table array is numbered consecutively from left to right (2, 3, 4 etc).

You also need to specify if you want an exact match to the lookup value or an approximate match (where something that is close to the lookup value is sufficient). This is what is referred to as the range lookup where entering false means Excel needs to find an exact match; true means that Excel can find an approximate match.

The structure of the function is
=VLOOKUP(lookup value, table array, column number, range lookup) and it will display the value from the column number that you specify.

I've also attached an example where you can change the formula in the colour cell. At the moment the lookup value is 100, which gives the value of 1 from the table. If you change the lookup value to 200, the yellow cell will display 2; if you change the lookup value to 300, the yellow cell will display 3.

I hope this helps.
Amanda