Build your first VLOOKUP and understand what each component means and how to use it.
The VLOOKUP command allows you to LOOKUP information and based on what it finds, bring some other information back.
VLOOKUP stands for Vertical Lookup and will search down a column and then extract information from another column. You can also use the HLOOKUP (Horizontal Lookup) command which searches along a rows (covered later).
For now we are going to focus on finding EXACT matches.
In this example we want to find a certain student and pull through their result and symbol. The yellow cells should bring through the results relating to student number A111.
Based on a step by step process we need to tell Excel the following
What must you look up and where will you find it
The first part is telling Excel what it must look up and where it must go to find it. In the example below we are in the first yellow cell and have told Excel that the Lookup Value is in cell A14.
Now that Excel knows that it is looking for the contents of cell A14 ( student A111 in this case) it needs to know where to go and look. To a human this is obvious, but Excel has thousands of columns and rows where it can look so we need to specify where. In this case it is the table shown in cells A4 to C8.
Once you have found it, what must you bring back
Once Excel has found the student you are looking for, it needs to know what to bring back for you. In this case we want to see the students percentage.
The way to tell Excel what to bring back is by specifying which column OF THE TABLE ARRAY you are interested in.
The answer
When you click OK you get an answer of 34%. Excel started at the top at student number A100 and went down cell by cell until it found student A111. It then went to the right to the second column and extracted the result.
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