Forum Discussion
LOOKUP Expression?
I have a feeling that you are getting towards the size of problem where Power Query might offer the best solutions (this is included in the workbook).
Otherwise, searches are currently far more efficient if you sort the lookup table by participant.
Then the formula
=LOOKUP(VALUE([@Participant]), tblArea)
will look up a participant in the first column of tblArea and return the corresponding value from the second column.
p.s. If you are an Office 365 user I believe that this distinction between exact searches and binary searches will soon disappear as the field you are searching will be sorted in memory before the first search, making subsequent searches very fast.
PeterBartholomew1 , I don't think on 10-20 thousand rows with so simple range it could be any issues with performance with any approach. Minus of Power Query it requires refreshing. Not a big issue with static data, but if you add records from time to time and shall to shift from one table to another to check only one additional attribute - that could be annoying.
I am absolutely sure you are correct with the problem as it stands. Out of curiosity where would you put the balance point (if one has to switch to Calculation Manual the cut-off point has probably been passed)? Would you expect 10s of thousand searches over 100s of thousand values to go well? I don't have much experience with large datasets that bring Excel grinding to a halt!
Another factor that might influence the decision is 'How is the additional data input?' If a PQ append query offers the best route to import data, then one might choose to continue with the join query even when LOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH might otherwise be fast enough.