

Lookup Function Essentials in Excel
Roman Kondratiuk
Lookup functions can rapidly and easily perform a multitude of tedious data matching tasks e.g. highlighting data mis-matches and anomalies between large tables; matching salaries to employees; awarding bonuses according to sales volumes, and mapping values from different sources into consolidated reports.
VLOOKUP matches data to a lookup table by column and can be used for:
– matching approximate pre-defined ranges; e.g. match levels of bonuses to sales achieved; or
– exact data matches between data sets; e.g. employee ID to specific salary
The lookup table in a lookup formula can either have absolute cell references or can be a named range.