🟡 Intermediate 20 minintermediate path
Lookups: VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP Explained
Lookups let one table pull matching data from another — the workhorse behind price lists, employee lookups, and merged reports.
Learning objectives
- Understand what a lookup does.
- Write a working VLOOKUP.
- Use XLOOKUP as a modern replacement.
Step-by-step
1. The idea
You have a table of products with prices. On another sheet you type a product code and want the price to appear automatically. That's a lookup.
2. VLOOKUP syntax
=VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, FALSE). The FALSE forces an exact match — almost always what you want.
3. XLOOKUP
=XLOOKUP(lookup_value, lookup_array, return_array). Simpler, doesn't care about column order, and returns clean errors.
Key takeaways
- Understand what a lookup does.
- Write a working VLOOKUP.
- Use XLOOKUP as a modern replacement.
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