VLookup in Excel
The Vlookup Function is a part of Excel that I personally use everyday. So many Excel users have no idea it even exists, so I thought this would be a great place to start for ExcelHints.com. Once you learn how to use vlookup, it will greatly ease many of the pains you have had in trying to group two pieces of information together.
VLookup stands for Vertical Lookup. Basically what it does it looks up a value you tell it to, against another range of cells. If it finds a match, it returns the value in the same row as the match of the column you specify. You can either have it return results for exact matches or the closest match.
Let’s start by taking a look at the formula for VLookup:
VLookup(value, table_array, index_number, not_exact_match)
value is what you are searching for in the first column of the table_array
table_array is the range you would like to look up a value for. You must include both the column you are looking for a value in and the column of the value you would like to return
Updates to Excel Hints
I am continuing to work on getting the website up and running. I just completed a contact form, allowing you to contact me with any Excel questions you have, which can be found at Contact Excel Hints. I have also added a Message Board, but I don’t have much experience hosting a board so that will most likely be Trial and Error until we get it right.
In the next few weeks I will be adding many other new features that I believe will increase the helpfulness of the site, including an index of the blog posting to sort through, site search, and a list of common features that will make your Excel Experience that much more enjoyable (maybe enjoyable isn’t the word for everyone, at least hopefully easier).
John
** Excel Hints provides Excel Tips and Excel Help for All Levels of Experience.
Familiarizing With the Visual Basic Editor
In this post, I’m am going to start off with just showing you the parts of a basic macro and how you can get to the editor. To see this feature for your self the first thing you want to do is record a macro. Try typing some text in a cell, maybe some copying and pasting, anything. Next were going to take a look at the code and see what happened.
Getting to the VBA Editor
After you record you macro and hit stop, the next step is to take a look at it and see what’s been recorded. There are 2 ways to get to the Visual Basic editor:
