V lookups

Dear Jane

Thank you for attending Excel Intermediate course!! I hope you enjoyed the course and benefited from it.

VLookup is basically a function that can help you to retrieve data from a table that may have lots of information. Please note that if you can only use Vlookup if the column headings in the table are arranged vertically. Normally people have the data arranged in this format. If the main headings are arranged in rows then you have you use the HLookup. It looks at the left most column in a table and retrieves the relevant information from the Table Array. This is helpful when you have large amount of data and you may not want to scroll up and down to view the specific information for a record. You may have data in different worksheets or even workbooks and want to lookup a value.

VLookup is covered in our Excel Adv level course. I can try to give you some example which hopefully should be able to make things a bit clear about VLookup.


I am uploading an excel file with some example. Please refer to it for the below mentioned explanation:

If you notice Cell Range A9:F49 is the main table.

A6 is the cell which other cells on the right will refer to display the result. Therefore, this will be our Lookup value.

In Cell B6 I entered the following formula:

=VLOOKUP(A6,A9:F49,2,FALSE)

Let