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Excel's Formula - sisman

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Using Lookup Functions<br />

In This Chapter<br />

● An introduction to formulas that look up values in a table<br />

● An overview of the worksheet functions used to perform lookups<br />

● Basic lookup formulas<br />

● More sophisticated lookup formulas<br />

213<br />

8<br />

This chapter discusses various techniques that you can use to look up a value in a table. Microsoft<br />

Excel has three functions (LOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and HLOOKUP) designed for this task, but you<br />

may find that these functions don’t quite cut it. This chapter provides many lookup examples,<br />

including alternative techniques that go well beyond Excel’s normal lookup capabilities.<br />

What Is a Lookup <strong>Formula</strong>?<br />

A lookup formula essentially returns a value from a table (in a range) by looking up another value.<br />

A common telephone directory provides a good analogy: If you want to find a person’s telephone<br />

number, you first locate the name (look it up) and then retrieve the corresponding number.<br />

I use the term table to describe a rectangular range of data. The range does not necessarily<br />

need to be an “official” table, as created by Excel’s Insert➜Tables➜Table command.<br />

Figure 8-1 shows a simple worksheet that uses several lookup formulas. This worksheet contains<br />

a table of employee data (named EmpData), beginning in row 7. When you enter a last name into<br />

cell C2, lookup formulas in D2:G2 retrieve the matching information from the table. The following<br />

lookup formulas use the VLOOKUP function:<br />

Cell <strong>Formula</strong><br />

D2 =VLOOKUP(B2,EmpData,2,FALSE)<br />

E2 =VLOOKUP(B2,EmpData,3,FALSE)<br />

F2 =VLOOKUP(B2,EmpData,4,FALSE)<br />

G2 =VLOOKUP(B2,EmpData,5,FALSE)

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