In Excel terms, this is your lookup value. The piece of information you’re searching for with your eyes. You acknowledge that we’re looking for the name ‘Nate Harris’ in the phonebook.A proper phonebook may not contain that kind of information but for the sake of this example – let’s say it does. You’re looking for Nate Harris’ salary.I know phonebooks are pretty outdated by now, but let’s say that we’re using one right now. Imagine the VLOOKUP function doing the same as you when you want to look something up. When we start entering the formula in a moment, you’ll see all of these phrases inside a tooltip box below the cell you’re typing in.Īll these inputs to the VLOOKUP formula must be separated with a comma (like in most other functions).Įvery time you put a comma, the tooltip box tells you how far you are in the formula, by bolding the current part of the syntax. = Whether we want to be precise or approximate in our search.Lookup_value = What you are looking for.“Syntax is a combination of the things you need to put into a function to make it work.”Ī VLOOKUP function needs these 4 inputs to work: “Syntax” is just a big ugly word that doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve heard it before. Now it’s time to get into the syntax of VLOOKUP. Type in “Name” in cell E2 and “Salary” in E3 and make the text bold.Now select a thinner border style and click the vertical line in the mid of the example.Then click the horizontal line in the mid of the example. Select a thick border from the “Style” options and click on the “Outline” preset.Right-click and select “Format Cells”.Go to the “Font” group of the “Home” tab on the ribbon and click the little arrow next to the “Borders” button. In this case 4 cells in total. Two for the name and two for the salary. We’re going to be looking for something, so include a spare cell to use for “searching”. Select some cells where you want the result of your calculation (the VLOOKUP function) to go. In the following, you’ll find my approach to creating a VLOOKUP which has been fine-tuned over several years and for me is the easiest and fastest solution. There are several ways of doing this, with some being more complicated (and effective) than others. If you don’t want to start over after several months of hard work in a workbook – do get the structure of your calculations and data right from the beginning. It can be revived, but usually, it’s easiest to start over. I find that this usually ends in “spreadsheet mayhem” (not good!) and is ultimately the cause of death for the workbook.īecause the calculations and data storage get mixed up.

Most people just put formulas into random cells.

How to get to phstat in excel