Excel 2016 Bible

Chapter 14Creating Formulas That Look Up Values

IN THIS CHAPTER

1. Introducing formulas that look up values in a table
2. Identifying the worksheet functions used to perform lookups
3. Getting acquainted with basic lookup formulas
4. Delving into more sophisticated lookup formulas

This chapter discusses various techniques that you can use to look up a value in a range of data. Excel has three worksheet functions (LOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and HLOOKUP) designed for this task, but you may find that these functions don't quite cut it.

I provide many lookup examples, including alternative techniques that go well beyond the Excel program's normal lookup capabilities.

Introducing Lookup Formulas

A lookup formula returns a value from a table by looking up another related value. A common telephone directory (remember those?) provides a good analogy. If you want to find a person's telephone number, you first locate the name (look it up) and then retrieve the corresponding number.

Note

I use the term table to describe any rectangular range of data. The range does not necessarily need to be an “­official” table, as created by choosing InsertTablesTable.

Figure 14.1 shows a worksheet that uses four lookup formulas. This worksheet contains a table of employee data, beginning in row 7. This range is named ...