Returning value based on a text list

[Christina Kang]

Hi everyone,

I have a list of 50 distinct accounts. There are three account managers (i.e., Team 1, Team 2, Team 3) in my organization each of whom is assigned to a book of distinct accounts (i.e., portion of the 50 distinct accounts).

I've created an excel sheet with one column housing a dropdown to select from the 50 accounts. Let's say one of the 50 accounts is named "AccountOne" and is assigned to Team 1.  If I choose AccountOne from the dropdown, how do I get a return value of "Team 1" in the next column? In summary, I would like excel to return Team 1, Team 2, etc based on the account chosen from a dropdown list. 

I've found information on IF functions, but can't seem to find a function that allows for searching through a range of text options to return a value. Thank you!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

You can use the Vlookup function for this. Consider the following screenshot:

The account list in columns E and F shows which team an account belongs to.

When an account is entered into cell A2, the formula in B2 looks up that account in column E and returns the team name from column F

The formula, as seen in the formula bar is

=VLOOKUP(A2,$E$2:$F$14,2,FALSE)

The formula can then be copied down.