Excellency AcademyOpen the appAdministration and Executive AssistantTier 345 minintermediate
VLOOKUP and Why It Breaks
Look values up from another table, and learn the three ways VLOOKUP quietly returns the wrong answer.
What you will learn
- Use VLOOKUP with an exact match to pull a value from a reference table
- Explain why omitting the fourth argument returns a neighbouring row instead of an error
- Lock the table range so the formula can be filled down
- Recognise that inserting a column changes what a hard-coded column index points at
Excel skills
VLOOKUP, IFNA · Table Lookups
The task
Twenty order lines need unit prices from the Prices tab before I send the quote. Two of the item codes were discontinued this month and are no longer on the price list. For those, put "Not listed" in the Unit Price column - do not guess, and definitely do not let another product's price creep in.
You work in a real spreadsheet in your browser, and your answer is checked against hidden traps the moment you submit.