Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you?.

What unique identifier are you looking up in the database?.

You can think of this box as the function asking us the following questions: The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function. The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel. To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function). This is found by first clicking the Formulas tab, and then clicking Insert Function:Ī box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel. We need to locate the list of all available functions that Excel has to offer, so that we can choose VLOOKUP and get some assistance in completing the formula. Each time someone enters a valid item code, the system would retrieve all the necessary information about the corresponding item. Typically you would use this sort of functionality in a reusable spreadsheet, such as a template. If all you need is one piece of information from the database, it would be a lot of trouble to go to to construct a formula with a VLOOKUP function in it.

Which of these pieces of information will it pass you back? Well, you get to decide this when you’re creating the formula. In the example above, you would insert the VLOOKUP function into another spreadsheet with an item code, and it would return to you either the corresponding item’s description, its price, or its availability (its “In stock” quantity) as described in your original list. VLOOKUP retrieves information from a database/list based on a supplied instance of the unique identifier. So let’s see if we can get that clear first: The hardest part of using VLOOKUP is understanding exactly what it’s for.

Our sample database above satisfies this criterion. Note: For the VLOOKUP function to work with a database/list, that list must have a column containing the unique identifier (or “key”, or “ID”), and that column must be the first column in the table. In this case, the unique identifier is in the “Item Code” column. Usually lists like this have some sort of unique identifier for each item in the list.

How to use vlookup