Excel VLOOKUP for beginners
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- Understand how to troubleshoot VLOOKUP
- How to do approximate vs exact matches in VLOOKUP
- How to do Wildcard matches in VLOOKUP
- How to use Named Ranges in VLOOKUP
- How to use VLOOKUP in Google Sheets
- Basic Excel knowledge is a pre-requisite.
VLOOKUP is probably the most used function in excel. This course does just one thing - Demystify how VLOOKUP works in excel. We cover the following aspects of VLOOKUP.
Why use VLOOKUP
VLOOKUP is used to cross-reference data. There are many situations where data in one sheet or tab needs to be cross referenced to extract values out of it. For example, say we have 1000 students data in a sheet. We want to find out the grades of 100 students among them. Other than doing this manually, what else can we do ? VLOOKUP is a way to automate this function so that we can extract all the information in one go , automatically using a simple formula.
How VLOOKUP works
There is a specific way in which VLOOKUP works. The parameters used in VLOOKUP are confusing initially. This course will make you understand the formula along with the parameters with simple examples and with simple data sets.
Approximate vs Exact Match
Sometimes you need to match ranges instead of exact numbers. For example, in the same students data, how would you match grades (like A or B) to absolute numbers ? That's when approximate match comes in. We will see how to do approximate matches with sales commission numbers.
HLOOKUP
VLOOKUP stands for Vertical LOOKUP. Although, this is the most used function, Excel also provides functionality to lookup horizontally. Data typically doesn't tend to this kind of lookup in real life, but nevertheless, we will cover HLOOKUP.
SQL Equivalent of VLOOKUP
If you understand SQL, we will look at how VLOOKUP is an equivalent of a particular version of SELECT statement that you will be aware of in SQL. If you have no knowledge of SQL, you can ignore this part.
Commonly occurring problems.
#N/A error
Number as Text
VLOOKUP works left to right only
Lookup is case insensitive
Named Ranges
If you use a particular excel sheet a lot repetitively, using named ranges can be very helpful. We will explore how named ranges can be created and used in VLOOKUP. This makes formulas look less ugly.
VLOOKUP in Google Sheets
VLOOKUP functionality is provided in Google sheets as well. In this quick chapter,we will look at how to use VLOOKUP in google sheets.
- Anybody who has trouble understanding VLOOKUP in Excel