Practice
Tutorial

Task 1: Basic VLOOKUP

Use VLOOKUP to find the department of employee with ID 102. The formula should look in column A for the ID and return the corresponding department from column C.

VLOOKUP Tutorial

The VLOOKUP function searches for a value in the first column of a table and returns a value in the same row from a specified column.

Syntax

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

Arguments

Argument Description
lookup_value The value to search for in the first column of the table
table_array The range of cells that contains the data
col_index_num The column number in the table from which to return a value
range_lookup Optional. FALSE for exact match, TRUE for approximate match

Example

Given this data:

| ID  | Name   | Department  |
|-----|--------|-------------|
| 101 | John   | Sales       |
| 102 | Sarah  | Marketing   |
| 103 | Mike   | IT          |

To find Sarah's department:

=VLOOKUP(102, A2:C4, 3, FALSE)

This would return "Marketing"

Common Errors

  • #N/A - Lookup value not found (check your range_lookup setting)
  • #REF! - Column index number is greater than number of columns in table
  • #VALUE! - Column index number is less than 1