In this video from the Excel 2010 Tutorial series, School of Technology Program Coordinator, Justin Denton, teaches how to find and use the Vlookup Function in Microsoft Excel 2010. This tutorial video is a great beginning step to your courses in technology at Rasmussen College.
Transcript
We have this one called Value Lookup, or it's called VLOOKUP. What that's going to do is, you'll give it a range-- I first want to find out what value I want to look up, which is 45. I want to find the number 45. And then I need to find out where I'm going to actually look for that value. I'm going to look for the range A4 to A13, because that's where all my information is. After that, I need to find out what column and index number, which typically will be default one, because it's the first column, that's what I'm looking up. And then what I want to do if it's false. If I do false, it'll display 45 if it finds it. If I don't have 45 and I say put 40, well false is not going to return a value at all. It'll say not applicable.
If I go back and maybe I want to put 45 down here, it will still return 45 because it's in the range. But maybe you really don't care what the value is, you just want something that's close to 45. Well you can type in true and it's going to be an approximate match. So if I change this to 43, it's going to go with something approximate. It's not really the best way to do it, but you have the ability to throw true in there and it'll find whatever value in here is somewhat close. It's not always going to be accurate, but there's an option to do it.
If you know you're not going to have that value and you want something close, you can pull that out. I typically like to go with false because I want the exact match. So if I put 45 back in here, I'm going to have 45 again. You can get pretty lengthy with how you do it. So if you've got a lot of customer data in here, and you just want to build a formula off in maybe the H column and have the formula just go through each line and determine if maybe an account statement is overdrawn, then it would key off if that's a negative value. Or maybe if it's below zero, put negative 0.1 or something like that, then you could flag it and have it pull off into another column.
Also something that we can do with conditional formatting, which will give it a little more oomph when you actually look at it because you can color those cells--
