Forum Discussion
Formula writing
- Yes, just add it to the formula so the if it row 40 as in the example above just add the D40/
E = D40 / VLOOKUP(A21,Sheet2!A21:B22,2,False)
Unfortunately all the formatting was lost in your message so I'm confused about your VLOOKUP but assuming that it is returning the sqft of the selected board then this should work.
According to me vlookup is an excellent tool in excel. It is very much useful when you have a big list of data and you want to pull the matching data with the values in one column
In simple terms
“VLOOKUP IS THE MAGNET TO PULL THE NEEDLE FROM THE HAYSTACK “
where the needle is the required data and the haystack is the master list of data.
An example, assume that you have a database of the list of employees working in the office ( say 10000 people ), and you have a list of 100 members who you want their Date of Birth and all the data is available in the master list.
Will you search for all 100 members one by one from the master list?
That's where vlookup kicks in if we insert the right formula the process will be done in a matter of minutes.
The formula goes like
{ =VLOOKUP( lookup value, array of content, column index number, condition) }
- Lookup value - if the name of the employee whose DOB is to be searched, in our case A2.
- Array of content - Is the master list where all the data is available.
- Column index - The number of the column where the data will be available ( i.e. the DOB column is available at the 2nd position from the EMP Name column. refer image 1 )
- Condition - 0 (FALSE) in most of the cases which match the exact values.
We can simply hold the cross-hair and pull for the rest of the rows required.
I personally use vlookup in almost daily to extract information from a pile of master data. It saves a ton of time by skipping the conventional method.
Best,
Zack Jerry
https://www.myperfectwords.com/
- Zach, I love that analogy of pulling the needle from the haystack. You are very correct and use of VLOOKUP in traditional excel. I don't know if you have Excel 365 but newer functions are now available that you should look into including XLOOKUP and FILTER. In your example above pulling 100 records would be ideal for FILTER(). XLOOKUP not only gives you more flexibility, built-in not found output, and more controls on the searching but is also (at least in most if not all cases) more efficient too.