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Creating lookup tables

Creating lookup tables - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel 2010 Essential Training

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Creating lookup tables

When you have a lot of data in a worksheet, there's a great set of functions called Lookups that can help you extract specific data. Let's take a look. We have two or sort of three related functions. One function is called VLOOKUP. V stands for vertical and you do that if you have your data arranged down by column. There's also an HLOOKUP, horizontal just in case your data are arranged across rows. Those are really the only two functions you want to deal with. They're sort of a third simply called Lookup and it'll work but it's legacy. It's from older versions of Excel. You really don't want to use it but I just have it here because you might encounter it once or twice. Well, let's talk about the syntax of the Lookup function. Now whether its HLOOKUP or VLOOKUP, the syntax works the same and vertical is much more common. So we say =VLOOKUP and then you have a Lookup value, which is the way you're going to find the data, the key to your data area. Your data range is where you have all…

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