This tutorial is an extract from our popular 1-day Advanced Excel course. Lookup formulas are one of the most asked about topics so we decided to put together a short tutorial.
Lookup tables provide a way of producing numbers or text that cannot be calculated with a formula. For example they could look up a salesman's commission dependent on what has been sold (Example 1), or the amount of discount available to a customer based on the amount of goods ordered (Example 2).
Excel has two Lookup functions, Vertical and Horizontal.
VLOOKUP looks down the vertical column on the left side of the table until the appropriate comparison is found.
HLOOKUP looks across the horizontal row at the top of a column until the appropriate comparison is found.
Function Syntax
LOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, range_lookup)
HLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, row_index_num, range_lookup)
Andy Trainer
14 Apr 2014