Excel function VLOOKUP

1st Question now a days which comes while soft skill interview is.......Do you know VLOOKUP & if you dont respond immediately there grows eyebrows of interviewer up with that grinny smile on his/her face; lets bettle it out & be the master of it. I will take you step by step with series of article to mastering lookup function in excel here on CCI.

Understanding Vlookup.

The VLOOKUP function performs a vertical lookup by searching for a value in the left-most column of table_array and returning the value in the same row in the index_number position. Value is the value to search for in the first column of the table_array.

Syntax

VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, match_type)

Cell F2 I have used  vlookup function, and formula is: =VLOOKUP(E2, A2:B9,2,0)

Here lookup_value is value is the value to search for in the first column of the table_array, in our case it is value of cell E2,

table_array  is two or more columns of data that is sorted in ascending order, in our case it is range A2:B9 ,

col_index_num is the column number in table_array from which the matching value must be returned. The first column is 1, for 2nd it is 2 & so on, in our case it is 2.

match_type is optional, It determines if you are looking for an exact match based on value. Enter FALSE to find an exact match. Enter TRUE to find an approximate match, which means that if an exact match if not found, then the VLOOKUP function will look for the next largest value that is less than value. If this parameter is omitted, the VLOOKUP function returns an approximate match.

If index_number is less than 1, the VLOOKUP function will return #VALUE!.

If index_number is greater than the number of columns in table_array, the VLOOKUP function will return #REF!.

If you specify FALSE for the not_exact_match parameter and no exact match is found, then the VLOOKUP function will return #N/A

(Refer attached sheet for explanation, next article on Reverse VLOOKUP)

Attachment