VLOOKUP in MS Excel

Hello and welcome back to Learn Java. It's been very long since I wrote my last post. This post will give you a short and simple tutorial on using VLOOKUP in MS Excel.

Verticle Lookup or VLOOKUP is a function in MS Excel that helps a user look for a specific value in a column based on another particular value in the first column.

A simple example: Your boss asks you to find the price of a food item based on its name.

Syntax: VLOOKUP(the value you want to look up, where you want to look for it(array/column/table), the column number the value is in, return an approximate or exact match)

Let's try to understand it more clearly:

Here's a little data set containing a table of my favourite food items. 

Step 1:

Select a specific cell/text value you would like to search for in the given table/data set.

Here, we are looking for the price of Pizza, so we use cell value "Pizza" which is also cell reference A3. We are making sure to use a cell value/reference that is in the first column.

Step 2:

Select the range of your lookup. In this case, I selected the entire table(A3:F19).

Step 3:

Select the number of column for the value you are looking for. In this case, it is 4.

Step 5:

Select either TRUE or FALSE. In VLOOKUP, FALSE refers to an exact value and TRUE refers to an approximate value. Since we are looking for an exact value, we write FALSE in the fourth parameter.

Step 6:

Close the parentheses and hit enter. You will be able to see the exact cell value you were looking for. In this case, you will see the value "15" because the price of Pizza is 15.

You can use the VLOOKUP function to ease your search in large data sets in your day-to-day life and professional life as well.

I hope you had fun learning the VLOOKUP function. If you liked this post, kindly share and subscribe to my blog for more interesting MS Excel and SAS tutorials.