Tutorial: Understand How to apply Excel VLOOKUP - Step by Step Guidelines

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You are highly welcome to my tutorial post titled ; Understand How to apply Excel VLOOLUP - Step by Step Guidelines. It is true that most organizations and people fine it so difficult to compute the salaries of their employees.

With the help of VLOOKUP function and formula you can be able to find things in a range or table by row. For instance, let's say that you want to look up the price of a mobile phones by they numbers, or you want to find out an employee name in your organization using their employee ID.

Now with the help of VLOOLUP, you can be able to look in one column for a search and return whatever result that you may get from the same row in another column, inrespective of the side that the return column is currently on. Well before looking at how you can be able to use Excel VLOOKUP I will like to first introduce you to what VLOOKUP is all about based on excel.

What is Excel VLOOKUP?

Okay friend, the V that you're seeing stands for "Vertical. which an in-built function that is program in Excel that allow us to establish a relationship between two or three different columns of excel and above. In a nutshell, Vertical (V) allows us to find "LOOK UP that is a value that is from one column of data and return it back the same way from another column without you changing anything.

As a staff in your organization, when you want to find some information that is in a large data spreadsheet, just like the data we used in our previous tutorial on PivotChart, or you have to search for the same kind of information throughout the spreadsheet using the excel VLOOLUP function.

Now in this post let's consider looking at the examples of the salary table of a company finance department. Now in the salary table, what you should start with is a piece of information which is easily retrieved or (already known). You should consider looking at information that can serve as an index data.

Now, let consider looking at the example below:

Here you have to begin with the information that is available already.

(In this tutorial, Employee's Name)

For you to find the information that you don't know about:

(In this tutorial, let's look up got Employee's Salary)

Below is the Excel Spreadsheet from the information above:

Looking at the image above, you can input the data into your Excel workbook.

Now from the spreadsheet above, in order for you to find out the Employee Salary that you don't know about, you will need to enter the Employee Code which is already known (available).

Although, by the time you begin applying VLOOLUP, value(Employee' salary) of the corresponding Employee Code will then be displayed to you. Let's a look at how it's use.

How to use Excel VLOOLUP function:

The guidelines below is a step by step guide on how you can easily apply the VLOOKUP function in your Excel worksheet.

Step:1 Go to the cell that you want to view the salary of the particular Employee. (In this tutorial, click on the cell with "H3 and then Ok).

Step:2 Enter the following VLOOKUP function =VLOOKUP ()Now at this point, you can enter the VLOOKUP function in the cell given above: Begin with an equal sign (=) which denotes that a Function has been entered, "VLOOKUP" should be used after the equal to sign.

Note: VLOOKUP function =VLOOKUP ()

Point to note: VLOOKUP make uses of pieces of data or arguments to execute function.

Step:3 1st Argument: Enter the look up value that you want to look up or search in the data.

You should know that your first argument would be the cell reference (I.e the placeholder) for the specific value you want to search or look up. As earlier said, Lookup value means the data that is available already which you known.

(In this tutorial, we are using Employee Code as our lookup value so our first argument can be H2 which is the value that need to be searched or looked up, which will represent our cell H2 as the reference.

Step:4 2nd Argument:
Table array. This refers to the block of value that is required to be searched. In Excel block of value is called table array. In this tutorial, our table array would Begin from cell B2 - cell E25.

Step:5 3rd Argument:
VLOOKUP syntax which is the column index no that refers reference column. In otherway round, it tells VLOOKUP where you should expect to find the data that you want to view.

Step:6 4th Argument:
Exact match. This is what tells the VLOOKUP Function to either approximate match or exact the match of the Lookup value. In this tutorial, we only want the exact match which is the false match.

Note:

TRUE: Stands for approximately match

FALSE: Stands for EXact match

Step:7 Now press Enter to notify the cell that you have completed the function in the Excel. Note, after you have press enter the message below which is error will then appear in the cell H2.

This is because there is no employee code that has been entered that will allow the value to search or look up.

At this point, when you have enter your Employer code in cell H2, it will automatically return back the corresponding value which is the Employee's Salary.

Ok friend, let's call it a day here and continued with this same topic; VLOOKUP Function next week. For the main time, I would like you to go through some of our previous tutorials post on Excel to refresh you memories once more.......

👉Tutorial: Learn How to Create Pivot Table in Excel

👉Tutorial: Introduction to MS Excel:The First Things You Should Know

👉Tutorial: Learn the Basic Excel Formulas and Functions with Examples Today

Conclusion:

Friend, in this tutorial, we have been able to explain some of the scenarios that had do with VLOOKUP Functions. VLOOKUP is a very a very important feature in Excel which allows us to manage our data more efficiently in a convenient ways. I am sure now that you can be able to make uses of VLOOKUP Function after you have read this post. Best of luck to you dear...

Thank you for stopping by and happy new week to you