Hyderabad Blues: [HM:252342] Excel Tip: Use Vlookup to extract values from several columns

Tuesday, 3 April 2012

[HM:252342] Excel Tip: Use Vlookup to extract values from several columns

Situation

Often we need our lookup formulas to go wild. Not in the sense of go-wild-and-chomp-a-few-kilo-bytes-of-data sense. But wild like wild cards.

For eg. In the below data, we may not remember the full name of sales person, but we know that her name starts with jac. Now how do you get the sales amount for that person?

Data:

Solution

Simple. Use wild cards. Like this: =VLOOKUP("jac*",$B$5:$E$17,3,FALSE) to fetch the value from 3rd column for the person whose name starts with jac

Examples:

Sample File

Download Example File – Using Wild cards with VLOOKUP formula

Special Thanks to

Michael Pennington, Lukas for the tip. (Click on the name to see their tip)