How do you use V Look up function in Microsoft Excel?

Here's an example scenario.

Let's say in range A1:C200 my data includes the following:

Column A: Employee Name

Column B: Date they worked

Column C: Total hours they worked that day.

I have 10 employees, each of whom worked 20 days out of the month.

They are divided into four teams.

In Column D I want to know what team they are on.

If I have a table listing each employee's name and team, I could use the VLOOKUP to populate column D for me.

I enter or copy and paste the Employee Name/Team list in columns H:I, Employee name in H, Team in I. Ten rows for ten employees (H1:I10).

In cell D1 I enter the following formula:

=VLOOKUP(A1,H:I,2,FALSE)

A1 points to one specific cell in my data table, the cell I want to link to another table.

H:I tells Excel where to look for the same thing it found in A1.

2 tells it that once it finds a match in H:I, count over 2 columns and return that value.

FALSE tells it that I want only an exact match (if you're using numbers or time, you could use TRUE or blank here, VLOOKUP will then look for the nearest value, but obviously it doesn't make any sense to "round" a name.)

As I carry that formula down in column D, A1 increments to A2, A3, A4, etc. The remainder of the variables in the formula remain the same.

Column D will now automatically populate with the team name, as shown in range H:I

If a value exists in column A but not in column H, it will return #N/A.

If a value exists in column A, and in column H, but column I is blank, it will return "0".

Caveats:

* It takes time to process the VLOOKUP. My example of 200 line items should take seconds, but if you have a very large data table, or if your lookup reference is very large, it will take longer. Watch the status bar, it will give you a percentage complete. Don't do anything else in Excel while it's processing, otherwise it will stop calculating.

* VLOOKUP, when using "FALSE", looks for an exact match. "John Smith" is not the same as "John Smith" or "John Smith " (note extra spaces).

* When referring to the table array (H:I in the above example), the information you're trying to match (Employee Name) has to be in the first column of the referenced range. It does not have to be the first column in the range itself (for example, column G could be Supervisor Name), just the first column referenced in the formula.

I hope this helps, I use VLOOKUP pretty much daily and it's incredibly useful.