From the course: Excel 2013 Essential Training

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Getting exact table data with the VLOOKUP function

Getting exact table data with the VLOOKUP function - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel 2013 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Getting exact table data with the VLOOKUP function

Sometimes you need to use the VLOOKUP function to match data exactly. In this list, in columns A through I, we need to find the department for the products showing in column A. In columns K, L and M, we've got a complete list master inventory, some 90 rows or so of all of our products by department, by category. What's not broken out there is the various colors which are implied and so we do see more data over in column C. So when we need to make a match, we want to use VLOOKUP but we've got to make sure that the data matches exactly. Unlike comparing numbers where we sometimes search for breakpoints if it's a text entry, it's got to be an exact match and with certain kinds of numbers like ID numbers, Social Security numbers, they too must be exact matches. We use the VLOOKUP function differently for exact matches than we do with approximate matches. Now to make this even clearer, I'm going to hide some of the columns, column C, D, E, F, G simply Right-Click and Hide for the moment…

Contents