CFI-Excel-eBook

The Corporate Finance Institute Excel
How to use VLOOKUP in Excel
Step 1: Organize the data
The first step to effectively using the VLOOKUP function is to make sure your
data is well organized and suitable for using the function.
VLOOKUP works in a left to right order, so you need to ensure that the
information you want to look up is to the left of the corresponding data you
want to extract.
For example:
In the above VLOOKUP example, you will see that the “good table” can easily
run the function to lookup “Bananas” and return their price, since Bananas are
located in the leftmost column. In the “bad table” example you’ll see there is
an error message, as the columns are not in the right order.
This is one of the major drawbacks of VLOOKUP, and for this reason, it’s highly
recommended to use INDEX MATCH MATCH instead of VLOOKUP.
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