VLOOKUP

Let's say Valentine's Day is coming up and you're the rare mix between a chick-magnet and a spreadsheet-nerd. Since you've got absolute game, you've been talking to a good amount of girls recently. With the holiday coming up, you want to pick a special someone to give flowers to and take out to dinner.

Your mixture of flirtatious skills and Excel wizardry has enabled you to create a spreadsheet of each of these girls you're talking to with each of their favorite flowers.

Within this spreadsheet, you've listed your love interests vertically.

Use VLOOKUP to look for a specific value within a row of a vertically-oriented table.

Coding a VLOOKUP function

Let's say you decide to take out Lilly and give her some flowers for your special Valentine's date. Using our vertically-oriented table, we can see she has an ID of 561.

Let's place her ID into cell F2, which represents the ID of the girl we want to get flowers for.

Something important to note here...

With VLOOKUP, the cell in which you're looking up must be the leftmost column in the table.

Now for our VLOOKUP function. Here is the template:

=VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])

Our lookup_value is the value we want to find in the leftmost column of the table, which we just placed into F2. We can code that like so:

=VLOOKUP(F2, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])

Concerning table_array, that is the table that we're referencing, which is contained within A1:C6.

=VLOOKUP(F2, A1:C6, col_index_num, [range_lookup])

col_index_num is a tough one to remember, so here it is in simple terms:

The col_index_num argument determines which column you want values to be shown for in the result.

Therefore, since we're wanting to see the girl's desired flower, we should put "3" in here, since the "Favorite Flower" column is the 3rd column in our table.

=VLOOKUP(F2, A1:C6, 3, [range_lookup])

Lastly, for [range_lookup] we're going to set it to FALSE, because we want an exact match of ID. If we set it to TRUE, it would only look for an approximate match and we could potentially buy the wrong flowers for our lovely date.

Use the [range_lookup] argument to determine whether or not you're looking for an exact match (FALSE) or an approximate match (TRUE). (In most cases, you will want to use FALSE.)

=VLOOKUP(F2, A1:C6, 3, FALSE)

When we type this into Excel, we figure out that Lilly likes Dandelions!