what does the vlookup function in excel 2010 do
VLOOKUP in Excel 2010 looks up a value in the first column of a table and returns a related value from another column in the same row. It is commonly used to match things like an ID, name, or code to pull back information such as a price, grade, or department.
How it works
The basic syntax is: =VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])
- lookup_value : what you want to find.
- table_array : the table or range to search.
- col_index_num : which column to return a value from.
- range_lookup :
FALSEfor exact match,TRUEfor approximate match.
Simple example
If you have employee IDs in the first column of a table, you can use VLOOKUP
to find an ID and return the employee’s name, salary, or other data from a
later column in that same row. For example, =VLOOKUP(A2,A10:C20,2,FALSE)
searches for the value in A2 and returns the matching value from the second
column of A10:C20.
One important limit
VLOOKUP only searches the leftmost column of the selected table range, and it returns data from columns to the right of it. If you need a different direction or more flexible lookup, Excel users often switch to other functions like INDEX/MATCH.
If you want, I can also show you a very short beginner example with a sample table.