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microsoft excel training - How do look up tables work?

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Pedro has attended:
Excel Intermediate course
Excel Advanced course

How do look up tables work?

Having problems with the theory behind VLOOKUPS.

Thanks

RE: How do look up tables work?

Hi Pedro

Thank you for your question; and apologies for the delay in response.

The idea behind the VLOOKUP is that you can ask Excel to look for a certain value or piece of text in one column, and then find and display another value/piece of text in the same row but a different column. Basically it saves you from having to look through a column of data for a particular bit of data, then find another piece of data in the same row yourself.

I hope this helps.
Amanda

Excel tip:

Ctrl+d's double life

Suppose I have a formula in B1 that I wish to copy into B2:B10. I can select B1:B10 then press Ctrl+d to copy the formula down the selected range. Users generally ignore this shortcut in favour of double-clicking on the fill handle to copy down, but Ctrl+d is useful sometimes particularly when there is no data in surrounding columns to guide to how far the double-click method should copy formulae.

Ctrl+d has another use though. When I use the drawing toolbar to draw objects such as Text Boxes, Rectangles and Ovals onto a worksheet, Ctrl+d makes an instant duplicate of selected shapes. For example, I need five Text Boxes the same size. I draw one Text box and adjust it to the size I want, select it, then press Ctrl+d four times to get four identical copies.

View all Excel hints and tips

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