Microsoft Office

Creating Formulas
That Look Up Values
This chapter discusses various techniques that you can use to look up a
value in a range of data. Excel has three functions (LOOKUP, VLOOKUP,
and HLOOKUP) designed for this task, but you may find that these functions
don’t quite cut it.
This chapter provides many lookup examples, including alternative techniques
that go well beyond the Excel program’s normal lookup capabilities.
Introducing Lookup Formulas
A lookup formula essentially returns a value from a table by looking up another
related value. A common telephone directory provides a good analogy. If you
want to find a person’s telephone number, you first locate the name (look it up)
and then retrieve the corresponding number.
I use the term table to describe a rectangular range of data.
NOTE
The range does not necessarily need to be an “official” table,
as created by Excel’s Insert ➪ Tables ➪ Table command.
Figure 15.1 shows a simple worksheet that uses several lookup formulas. This
worksheet contains a table of employee data, beginning in row 7. This range is
named EmpData. When you enter a last name into cell C2, lookup formulas in
D2:G2 retrieve the matching information from the table. The following lookup
formulas use the VLOOKUP function:
IN THIS CHAPTER
An introduction to formulas that
look up values in a table
An overview of the worksheet
functions used to perform
lookups
Basic lookup formulas
More sophisticated lookup
formulas
D2
E2
F2
G2
=VLOOKUP(C2,EmpData,2,FALSE)
=VLOOKUP(C2,EmpData,3,FALSE)
=VLOOKUP(C2,EmpData,4,FALSE)
=VLOOKUP(C2,EmpData,5,FALSE)
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