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hello and welcome to your weekly Excel tutorial with Dave
today we're going to talk about the Vlookup function in Excel
the Vlookup function in Excel is going to allow me to carry information from one
spreadsheet or one workbook
to another spreadsheet or another workbook so in this particular case we
have our
example here with a the name and the phone number but no desk number
and our second sheet has name phone number and desk number some sort the
physical roster verses
a personnel roster so if we desire or need this desk number to be carried from
one spreadsheet to another
we're not always going to have the same order so we can just copy and paste
into the new spreadsheet because we need the desk to be associated with
the person or sometimes the phone number so in this particular case
we're going to use the the Vlookup function the Vlookup function is going to
look
up what that person has and pull it over on the new spreadsheet
so when we type the Vlookup function you see that has
several different arguments there are actually four here where the
lookup value which is the value that you want to associate to
the table array which is where the table of information is that you're looking at
and the column index number which is the column number that you want to carry
forward
and then finally this range look up which indicates whether you're looking
for an exact match
or an approximate match let's get started
the lookup value that we want here for desk numbers we want to look at John Doe
so we're going to select a2 moving to the next argument we will look at the table
array
the table array is actually over here we need to select the name now that name
because I'm selecting the name on my first argument
we need the name to be the leftmost column that we select
in our second argument so we're actually going to select all three of these
and as you'll note to the right hand side
my cursor it says 3c that means I selected three total columns
it'll be important for our final argument so our third argument
is what am I looking for
so what it's doing now is I've selected columns a through C
it's going to ask what column
what number column do I look at in this case I have a which is one
be which is two and three is c I want c
I want to carry the desk number over so I'm going to select
three in this argument the final argument again is
true or false now true will be an approximate match
and false will be an exact match in this case I want an exact match I don't want
to find
anybody but exactly john doe so once I complete that it looks up it looks
all the records in a and fines john doe
it found john doe here and then it looks over in the table to the third column
and brings forward 1D I can do that I can copy this down on
all of them another way we can do this you don't always have to select the
entire table
so if we get rid of this and we go through the lookup one more time
we select
the argument that we want so in this case the phone number
and then we want to select the table ray which in this case
I can't select a through C I have to select
B through C because the leftmost column must have
what I'm looking for in this case I'm looking for the phone number
and then finally we look at column two because B
now is one and C now is two because of the way that I selected my second argument
and now again we want the exact match
so false so what we have here
is two different ways to do Vlookup
you can use the name or the phone number a lot of cases
you'll need something that is identical on both
spreadsheets in order to carry one forward if you can't get that
you're going to have to go a little bit of a different route but we'll talk about that later
so if you like this video if you found it helpful please subscribe
if you have any questions leave them in the comments or send me a message
and I'll get back to you thank you