And there you have it! His salary! 3 inches to the right of his name. You place the tip of your finger right below his name and move your hand to the right past information like his address, phone number, and other boring stuff. You browse through the pages and find Nate Harris.In Excel terms, this is your lookup value. The piece of information you’re searching for with your eyes. You acknowledge that we’re looking for the name ‘Nate Harris’ in the phonebook.A proper phonebook may not contain that kind of information but for the sake of this example – let’s say it does. You’re looking for Nate Harris’ salary.I know phonebooks are pretty outdated by now, but let’s say that we’re using one right now. Imagine the VLOOKUP function doing the same as you when you want to look something up. When we start entering the formula in a moment, you’ll see all of these phrases inside a tooltip box below the cell you’re typing in.Īll these inputs to the VLOOKUP formula must be separated with a comma (like in most other functions).Įvery time you put a comma, the tooltip box tells you how far you are in the formula, by bolding the current part of the syntax. = Whether we want to be precise or approximate in our search.Lookup_value = What you are looking for.“Syntax is a combination of the things you need to put into a function to make it work.”Ī VLOOKUP function needs these 4 inputs to work: “Syntax” is just a big ugly word that doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve heard it before. Now it’s time to get into the syntax of VLOOKUP. Type in “Name” in cell E2 and “Salary” in E3 and make the text bold.Now select a thinner border style and click the vertical line in the mid of the example.Then click the horizontal line in the mid of the example. Select a thick border from the “Style” options and click on the “Outline” preset.Right-click and select “Format Cells”.Go to the “Font” group of the “Home” tab on the ribbon and click the little arrow next to the “Borders” button. In this case 4 cells in total. Two for the name and two for the salary. We’re going to be looking for something, so include a spare cell to use for “searching”. Select some cells where you want the result of your calculation (the VLOOKUP function) to go. In the following, you’ll find my approach to creating a VLOOKUP which has been fine-tuned over several years and for me is the easiest and fastest solution. There are several ways of doing this, with some being more complicated (and effective) than others. If you don’t want to start over after several months of hard work in a workbook – do get the structure of your calculations and data right from the beginning. It can be revived, but usually, it’s easiest to start over. I find that this usually ends in “spreadsheet mayhem” (not good!) and is ultimately the cause of death for the workbook.īecause the calculations and data storage get mixed up.
We even have guides on how to use conditional formatting in Excel to color-code specific cells and how to add comments to your formulas in Microsoft Excel.Most people just put formulas into random cells. For example, when you protect a sheet or workbook, all of the cells will be locked, but you can also lock cells individually by right-clicking and selecting "Format Cells." And if you need to, you can also freeze rows and columns by selecting "Freeze Panes" in the View tab.īut not everyone is a fan of Excel, so if you need to convert Excel spreadsheets to Google Sheets, we have a guide for that, as well as a guide on how to open Google Sheets in Excel.įor business users, we also have 10 Excel business tips that can help you keep your job, including guides on how to remove duplicate data, recover lost Excel files, use pivot tables to summarize data, and more. There are a number of neat tips that'll help you out when you're managing your Excel spreadsheets. For example, if you have one worksheet with names and phone numbers and another sheet with names and email addresses, you can put the email addresses next to the names and phone numbers by using VLOOKUP. Using VLOOKUP, you can not only search for individual values, but also combine two worksheets into one. Enter the value whose data you're searching for.