What is VLOOKUP?

[James Falconer]

Can someone explain the syntax of VLOOKUP to me (in excel) and how it's best used?

 

[anthonyng]

@James Falconer It's awesome...

In a very simple example

Say you have a list of information like usernames on sheet1. And say you have a list of usernames and their FULL names on another sheet2.

Say you need to grab the full names from sheet2 to put onto sheet1. so vlookup helps by checking the username in sheet1, finds it in sheet2 and matches it up and brings in the value of the full name. (lets also assume they are in complete different order, or you have less username in sheet1 than sheet2 and you can't simply just copy paste :excited

V is for vertical, so you need to have the data going vertical. It's best to have the look up side (sheet2) unique, as it will go and retrieve the first one it finds.

The range you are looking for the data, the first column you indicate needs to be the on your trying to match, then the retrieval column # is whatever column the data you want is in. Sometimes you select a big range of data and fullname could be column2 of your selection, or column10 even... Depends on how the source is connected.. The last param of true or false, I always use FALSE to make it match exactly. I don't have much of a use case for TRUE.

 

[nickx91]

VLOOKUP can be referred as Vertical Lookup in a given data. Microsoft defines VLOOKUP as:

In its simplest form, the VLOOKUP function says:

=VLOOKUP(Value you want to look up, range where you want to lookup the value, the column number in the range containing the return value, Exact Match or Approximate Match – indicated as 0/FALSE or 1/TRUE).

Source: Microsoft

You can use VLOOKUP as:

=VLOOKUP(lookup value, range containing the lookup value, the column number in the range containing the return value, optionally specify TRUE for approximate match or FALSE for an exact match).

 

[tgp]

Excel also has an HLOOKUP (Horizontal) function, but it is seldom used, due to how spreadsheets are normally set up.

The last param of true or false, I always use FALSE to make it match exactly. I don't have much of a use case for TRUE.

I've never used TRUE either, and I don't recall ever seeing it used. I've tried it, but it's a bit too general and includes too much to make it useful for me.