Index function

Hi Natalia

Thanks for getting in touch. Sorry we didn't get time to cover this during training. As you know, the VLOOKUP will only return values to the right of the lookup value. There's no way to force VLOOKUP to go to the left.

You need to use two functions to achieve this, a MATCH function nested in an INDEX function.

The MATCH function returns the position of an item in array (a sort of crude lookup).

The INDEX function returns the value found at a given position.

When you use them together they usually look like this:

=INDEX(list 1, MATCH(lookup value, list 2, 0))

(The zero in MATCH means exact match only).

This can be quite a long-winded explanation, so I've created the accompanying sheet to explain it in more detail, along with some formulas you can try.

I hope this helps, please get back to me if you'd like further examples.

Kind regards

Gary Fenn
Microsoft Office Specialist Trainer

Tel: 0207 987 3777
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