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Table of Contents

Intro ............................................................................................................. 3

How to use VLOOKUP in Excel ..................................................................... 6

Some Tips & Advanced Excel Tricks............................................................ 12

Using Vlookup And Nested If In Excel For Golf Scoring ............................... 27

Too Many Options, Which One Should I Use? ............................................ 30

Combining Excel Sumif, Vlookup, If Is Error Functions, etc ......................... 33

Vlookup or "Relationships" In Excel 2013 .................................................. 37

Learning Vlookup is Only the Beginning ..................................................... 39

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3 Intro

Hey people!

My name is Pete and I am the owner of Experiments in

Finance as of 2011. This blog was once half about

personal finance and half about Excel tutorials. It seems

that most people here are more interested in Excel than

personal finance so I've decided to switch it completely

to the usage of Excel. This is also the reason why you

have this book in your hand… or on your computer!

Thank you for registering to my newsletter where I will share all my Excel

tips I’ve learned over the years. I promise to never spam you with irrelevant

ads and only provide you with Excel tutorial oriented content.

How Excel Earned me a Promotion

I first started my career working for a bank in the financial industry. I was

23 and eager to work and get a promotion as soon as possible. I rapidly

noticed my boss was having a problem with keeping up with his

department stats.

We were a team of 7 employees logging our sales in separate excel

spreadsheets. Since he used to receive his stats every quarter from the

“stats department from the bank” , he wanted to get a closer look at his

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4 daily business. This is why, once a week, he had to ask for them by email

and compile the results manually. It was time consuming and not very

accurate.

After discussing this problem with one of my friend, he showed me how to

use Excel to automatically compile the data, make graphs and trends out of

it. After a few hours of computing, I’ve had generated a powerful stats

tracking system for my boss.

No more emails sent to employees – He could get stats at any time

in the day without asking anybody!

No more hours spent compiling stats manually – a Simple click on

the macro button and the compilation was made within seconds!

No more data errors – All stats were tracked and packaged by Excel,

data became exempt from human errors!

The time I’ve saved my boss with this “simple” Excel spreadsheet had been

the key for my first promotion. Everybody on the floor heard about my

system and how productive I was as an employee. In addition to my

promotion, I’ve earned credibility instantly.

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5 Most People Don’t Know How To Use Excel at Work – Be The Star!

You don’t need to master Excel inside out to be the hero at work; you

simply have to know how to use formulas that will help YOU being more

productive. Saving time and hassles to your boss is definitely the best way

to become indispensable at work and earn the next promotion.

I’m here to show you how to achieve this goal by using the power of Excel.

So let’s start with this book that will show you VLOOKUP inside out. If you

use Excel much at your job, sooner or later, you're bound to need to look

up values in a table. One of the most useful functions in Excel,

called vlookup, does exactly that. The "V" in vlookup stands for "vertical"

and "lookup" is pretty self explanatory. This function allows you to look up

values in a table that are listed in column format (how most tables are laid

out), given another value (let's call this the "key"). Excel also has a sister

function called hlookup (h = horizontal) that can be used to look up values

in rows.

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6 How to use VLOOKUP in Excel

Sadly, as most companies seem to rely on Excel as a poor-man's database

of sorts (a totally unscalable solution and prone to errors with every

revision, but don't get me started), once you know vlookup, it's likely to

become one of your most often used Excel functions.

So, let's get started with a very simple example of what vlookup is all about.

Suppose you had the following table:

Given a list of names in another part of the table (in this case, column H),

you want to figure out what kind of animal it is:

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7 Vlookup's format looks like the following:

=vlookup(lookup value, table where values reside, column # where values

are located, false)

Let's look at each of these parts a bit closer.

The first thing that goes into the vlookup function is the thing you know (or

are given) and that will be used to lookup other values. In this case, you

have the names of the animals, so these are the things we know. In our

example, they reside in column H, from cells H2 through H5. If we wanted

to put the type of animal next to the name of the animal in column I (so I2

would correspond to the name of the animal in H2), we would insert the

vlookup function there:

and put H2 as the first thing in our vlookup function:

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8 Next, we need to know the location of the table where our values reside.

These happen to be from cells A1 through B5 in this example, which we

would highlight with our mouse to insert into the vlookup function. It's very

important that you include all the cells in the table.

Highlight the table with your mouse:

At the same time, the vlookup function automatically puts in the cells

you've highlighted:

Next, we need the column number where the values are located. Always

start with the first column (column A in this case) as #1 and count out to

the right. In this example, the type of animal listed is in column 2, so that's

what we would need to insert in the vlookup function. Note that to use

vlookup, your keys always have to be to the left of your values. (We'll cover

more of this in part II of the tutorial at a later date.)

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9

Finally, the last attribute that vlookup takes is either "true" or "false". I

happen to always use "false", and what this does is force vlookup to return

the first exact value it finds. If that value isn't found, then vlookup conks

out and returns "#N/A". Though we won't use it in this example, if you

select "true", then rather than always looking for the exact value, vlookup

will return the exact value if it exists, or the closest one to it that doesn't

exceed the key. (If you use "true", you will need to sort your data in

ascending order before using vlookup.)

Still with me? Again, this is what we would actually put in cells I2 if the

names of the animals we have are located in cells H2 through H5:

=vlookup(H2, A1:B5, 2, false)

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10 Once we close off the parenthesis and hit "Enter", vlookup automatically

calculates:

And so on. We would continue down each cell in column I that we needed.

One thing to note is to make sure that the location of your keys and values

is always selected correctly. Oftentimes, as you copy-and-paste formulas all

around Excel, the location of the data will also move around relative to the

cell. The easiest way to prevent this is to "lock" the range of the location; in

this case, we would do so by using "$A$1:$B$5" instead of "A1:B5". This

way, as we move down column I, say, to cell I2, A1:B5 doesn't become

A2:B6 but stays with the original range of data. This way, we can just copy

what's in cell I2 down the rest of the cells (from I3 through I5):

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11 Finally, here's our result, after making the "$" changes and copying and

pasting the formula down the rest of the column:

This has been a really simple example of vlookup, and I'll cover a bit more in

part II with another example, still simple, but with slightly more data.

Although in practice, vlookup is usually used between Excel sheets and

workbooks, once you understand this example (which has been done

within a single sheet), using vlookup outside the same sheet shouldn't be

much harder.

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12 Some Tips & Advanced Excel Tricks

In this section, we'll look at a slightly more complicated example and show

a couple of tips and tricks for making VLOOKUP work correctly.

By the way, I've received several emails regarding this eBook and just want

to encourage readers to let me know if there are other examples of

functions or situations they face that they need help with. They make a

great source for future posts on this site :)

In our last example, we had a simple, two-column list of names and types of

animals. In this post, we'll take a look at a list of employee names and data,

say, for calculating commissions for sales people. Here's what our data

looks like:

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13 As you can see, we're given employees' last and first names, their base

salaries, their bonus percentage, and the % of the year that they were

employees. We're also given a unique identifier in the form of an employee

number. Let's examine the data a bit further.

First, what we should notice is that there are employees with the same last

and first names. There's an Andrew Anderson as well as an Andrew Cobb.

And a Penny and Jim Dee.

Remember that VLOOKUP will either return the first match it finds in a list.

In this case, if we were to use VLOOKUP to lookup a list of last names or

first names, VLOOKUP would always return Andrew Anderson's data (if we

were looking using the "First Name" field) or Penny's data (if we were

looking using the "Last Name" field).

So, What to do?

In this example, we're lucky to have a unique identifier in the form of

"Employee Number". Each number is assigned only once to the employee,

so this field would be a safe one to use for VLOOKUP. The only problem is

that it's located all the way at the end of the data, to the right of all the

other fields. Remember that VLOOKUP has another criteria: whatever field

you're using to look up other data has to be to the left of all the other

fields.

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14 The easiest way to accomplish this is to insert a column to the left of "Last

Name" (Column A) and copy-and-paste the "Employee Number" column

there. Here's how that would look, step by step:

Step 1: Select column F, where "Employee Number" data is located:

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15 Step 2: Right-click on the mouse:

Step 3: Select "Copy" from the menu:

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16 All of column F is now highlighted in a dotted line:

Step 4: Highlight column A:

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17 Step 5: Right-click on the mouse once more:

Step 6: Select "Insert Copied Cells" on the menu

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18 Step 7: The cells from column F are now copied over to column A, and

everything is shifted over one column:

Now, employee numbers appear in both column A and G. Hitto get rid of

the highlight around column G.

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19 We're now good to go!

By the way, if you had not had unique identifiers like employee numbers

readily available, you could potentially use the CONCATENATE or "&"

function in Excel to "create" unique identifiers. CONCATENATE is a function

that just munges two fields together. In this case, creating a unique

identifier out of concatenating last name and first name would probably

work.

Back to the tutorial. Suppose we had a second sheet that had a list of

employee numbers for the four employees who had worked less than 100%

during the year, and we wanted to calculate their bonuses for the year.

Notice we swapped first and last name orders in this sheet and put the

employee numbers in a different order:

We just want to fill in the data from the other source (possibly from

another Excel sheet or workbook) in order to do the calculation. Here, I've

left the original data in "Sheet1" and am pulling the data into "Sheet2".

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20 What would we put into cell B2 in order to pull the data correctly? In the

example in the last post, we only had two columns of data. In this example,

we have seven, after copying over the employee numbers into the first

column.

For the "First Name" column, we would be pulling data from column 3 in

our data set (not column 2, which contains last names). So here's what the

VLOOKUP would look like for cell B2:

=VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet1!A1:G8,3,FALSE)

And here's the excel step-by-step:

Step 1: Insert the VLOOKUP function by typing "=vlookup(" in cell B2:

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21 Step 2: We're looking up Employee Numbers, which are located in the

previous column, so we put in A2 for cell B2:

Put in a "," after this to move on to the next input for VLOOKUP called

"table_array".

Step 3: Now we need to highlight the area where all the data resides:

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22 Put in a "," after this to move on to the next input for VLOOKUP, called

"col_index_num".

Step 4: Remember that in this case, we need to reference column #3,

where first names are located. We always start with the lookup value as

column #1 and count toward the right.

Put in a "," after this to move on to the final input for VLOOKUP.

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23 Step 5: Finally, we want to put in "false" as the final input into VLOOKUP to

tell it to look for exact matches.

Now close off the parenthesis to VLOOKUP, and the cell is automatically

populated with the data we need.

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24 The key now is to populate the rest of the cells. Can you figure out how to

do this? One way would be to go through each cell and repeat the steps

above. For example, to populate cell C2, we would write:

=VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet1!A1:G8,2,FALSE)

and so on, referencing each column where the data resides. ("Salary"

resides in column 4, "bonus" in column 5, etc.) Another way would be to

use Excel's anchoring mechanism so that we could copy and paste formulas

a bit more efficiently.

For example, for the rest of the cells under "First Name", what we could do

is write the following instead in B2:

=VLOOKUP($A2,Sheet1!$A$1:$G$8,3,FALSE)

What putting a "$" sign does in front of cell coordinates is to "lock" them in

place. By putting $A2 instead of A2 in the first input section, we lock "A" in

place (because all our employee numbers are in column A) and let the "2"

change as we go down the row.

By putting "$A$1:$G$8" instead of "A1:G8" as we originally had, we lock in

the entire A1 to G8 cells in place and keep that section "locked" no matter

where we put the formula.

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25 If we then copy the formula down to cells B3 through B5, we don't have to

retype the formula each time. Similarly, you can copy the formula across

each row, making sure to just change each column number so that you're

pulling the right data.

Here's what the finished table would look like:

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26 And here's what the final column, which is just the total bonus calculation,

would look like if we assumed that bonuses equaled salary * bonus * % of

year worked:

In this example, we populated a new table in a new sheet with data from a

separate sheet. But keep in mind one of the powerful things of VLOOKUP is

that with a unique identifier such as "Employee Number", what we could

do is create an entirely new table with elements from multiple other tables

that each contain "Employee Number". For example, salary information

might be stored in one place, and employee names in another. By using

VLOOKUP to lookup employee numbers from each table, we could create

one table that contains all information at once.

This has been a pretty lengthy example that's actually covered a lot of

different Excel tips, so we'll stop here. If you have any specific questions or

examples that you wouldn't mind sharing (of course, all data would be

disguised and I'd get your permission first), I'd be happy to answer them by

creating a post with your example in the center.

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27 Using Vlookup And Nested If In Excel

For Golf Scoring

Showing Excel tutorials is great but I always like real life examples to show

you how you can use Excel functions for almost everything. I’ve received a

very interesting email from a retired member of the military asking some

help with a golf scoring issue. Needless to say that on so many levels I was

more than happy to help out. While my blog is about "Experiments in

Finance, it's fair to say that many finance lovers like to play golf as well. It's

not the easiest problem to explain but hopefully with his comment and a

preview of his spreadsheet you will get the idea. Here we go:

"I need help with writing an "IF" formula in Excel. Background: I run a local

golf league with 40 to 70 golfers playing each week. Instead of using strokes

and keeping up with the handicaps, I use a point system. Each week I have

to manually calculate each man's score, plus or minus, from his required

points.

Example: For myself I currently am required to make 45 points. If I make

within plus or minus 2 of the 45 points there is no change to my next weeks

requirement. However, if I make minus 3 or more points, my score will drop

1 point(to 44). If on the other hand, I score 3 or 4 points above 45, my new

point requirement increases by 1 point, if I score 5 or 6 points above, my

requirement increases by 2 points, if I score 7 or more points, my

requirement increases to 3 points. I currently use an excel spreadsheet,

listing the players. I enter their that days point total and then manually do

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28 the math and enter their new point requirement. I can continue to do the

math...but in this day and age I would like to work "smarter not harder""

Here is an example of his spreadsheet:

First off, the points that he discussed are not exactly the same as the ones

in the spreadsheet but that is not a problem, we are looking for a flexible

solution anyway.

I used the following method:

There are 4 possible answers:

-"a"

-a given range (in this case, between -1 and 5)

-lower than that range

-higher than that range

Basically, I will first use "if conditions" to check if any of the first 3 occur,

and then refer to a range of results if it's not the case.

The following formula looks more complicated than it really is:

=IF(C3="","",IF(C3=$V$4,B3+$W$4,IF(C3-B3>$V$5,B3+$W$5,IF(C3-B3

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29 Basically, it checks if the previous score made is filled, if it the result is

either "a", higher than the range, lower than the range and applies the

adjustment depending on those.

If none of those conditions are met, it simply checks the range.

You can modify the range or values at any time by changing columns "U"

and "V". You can also simply copy the blue cells to a new column "req". try

copying from P3:P22 to R3:R22.

Here is what the new spreadsheet looks like:

I also invite you to download the spreadsheet to see for yourself!

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30 Too Many Options, Which One Should I

Use?

Excel Nested If Condition With Vlookup

One of the challenges about resolving issues in excel is that there are

usually so many different ways to resolve a given problem. It's all about

understanding the exact need and trying to find an optimal solution that

will be:

As easy as possible to create and modify later on

Quick and efficient to use

As light as possible

Etc.

In this case, I received an email from a reader that had a challenge. I will

simply show you a screenshot of the file that he sent and you will get the

idea:

Interestingly, there are similarities between this problem and the golf

scoring problem that I discussed recently. The main difference which makes

it much more difficult is that the number of possible results is unlimited.

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31 That makes it challenging on many levels and makes it impossible to use a

simple vlookup. I wasn't quite sure how to tackle this specific problem. As is

always the case, using a macro was certainly an interesting option. Using a

nested if statement could have worked, or even a combination of a few of

those but given the number of possible outcomes, it would be very difficult

to work with, and even more tricky to modify later on. Why?

Imagine using an If(xxx,y,if(xxx,y,if(xxx,……. Etc)

This would have gone on and on. My next reflex was to ask the reader if

this would be used for multiple lines at a time. If so, that would make things

even more difficult. Thankfully, in this specific case, it was going to be done

one at a time. This meant that I could simply verfiy (with a nested if

statement for each line if that specific answer was the correct one.

In O2 I added:

=IF(AND($F$4>M2,$F$4

And in P2 I added:

=IF(AND($F$4>M2,$F$4

I dragged both formulas and then added the following in F7:8:

=VLOOKUP("YES",O:P,2,FALSE)

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32 You can see the result here:

And you can download the spreadsheet off course:)

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33 Combining Excel Sumif, Vlookup, If Is

Error Functions, etc

I’ve received another interesting question by email which I wanted to share

in this book since it was not the first time I had received this type of

question. In this specific case, it required me to use several of the functions

that I have been writing about on this blog so I thought it would make an

interesting case. First, let me explain what the user asked for. You will not

have the exact same problem but I think that trying to understand it can

help you a great deal. Basically, this user has a list of documents that you

can see in column A. Then, there is a reference for that document and a

date in columns B and C. What this reader would like is:

-For each document number, get the reference number for the most recent

modification

The tricky part here is that most documents appear several times (because

they were modified on several dates)

Alternatives

Problems like this are so interesting because there so many different ways

to get them done. One way would have been to do a macro with a loop as I

did a few weeks ago. I will however do it without a macro for this time, it

should be as simple.

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34 My first step is to simply sort the entries by date, this is the basis of

everything that I will do, so here is a simple sort:

Then, I simply want to see for each line, is there a more recent entry for

that specific number. In other words, is there a row, above the current one,

that has this number. How would I do it? This concern does not exist for the

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35 first row, so cell D2, which will determine if such an entry exists will be

simple:

"Y" so this means that "Y" it is the most recent.

For the next line, I would check by doing a vlookup. Vlookups are actually a

great way of simply validating if a specific data exists. Here is how I will do

it. First, here is my initial formula for D3:

=VLOOKUP(A3,$A$1:A2,2,FALSE)

I currently get an error since it doesn't.

But really, what I need, is simply to know if it exists. It is difficult to work

with errors. So I use if "if is error" fundction" and will replace this with:

=IF(ISERROR(VLOOKUP(A3,$B$1:A2,2,FALSE)),"","Y")

Basically, if there is an error (not found), I will enter "Y". However if there is

no error, it means that there is a more recent entry so I will leave it blank. I

can then use this formula for the entire set, you can see the result here:

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36

Then, you can simply add a simple "if" such as:

=IF(D2="Y",A2,"")

=IF(D2="Y",B2,"")

The end result is:

You can download the spreadsheet here.

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37 Vlookup or "Relationships" In Excel

2013

Vlookup functions are difficult to understand initially and while they

become very powerful once you do fully understand how to use them, I can

tell you from the dozens of requests that I get every month that the

concept remains very difficult to understand. Microsoft is trying to make

life easier for users by changing the concept again. Here is the direct quote

from CFO's excel 2013 preview:

Relationships instead of VLOOKUP. If you add your worksheets to the

pedestrian “Data Model” feature, you can use the Relationships icon to

define that CustID in your million row transaction worksheet is related to

CustNumber in your customer worksheet. Now, without doing millions of

VLOOKUPs, you can create pivot tables from the data on both worksheets.

Whether you’re sick of people who feel superior because they can do

VLOOKUP, or someone who does VLOOKUP in their sleep, no one can argue

that creating a relationship in 3 clicks is faster than waiting for a million

VLOOKUPs to recalculate.

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38 This might work although it will simply make other parts more difficult. I'm

assuming that having the right column headers will become very important

as Excel 2013 will try to guess how data interacts with each other. It will

certainly be very interesting to see. I'm curious, do you expect to upgrade

to Excel 2013 as soon as possible? I will certainly start moving soon

although I do use cloud computing a lot more than I did just a few months

ago so it will only impact my more complex spreadsheets. If ever you'd like

to access a preview version, you can try going here.

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39 Learning Vlookup is Only the

Beginning

First, I hope you enjoyed this book and you learned a few tricks on how to

use Vlookup properly. If you are still struggling with this function, send me

an email at pete@experiglot.com. It will be my pleasure to assist you with

your problems.

Now, you are ready for the next step. As you know, Vlookup is only the

beginning of what Excel can do for you. This function certainly doesn’t

answer all your questions. This is why I’ve created a master resource to

learn everything useful about Excel. You will find several tutorials

(including this one) showing you how to:

Automate your daily tasks, save time or money

Resolve all your problems and stop staring at your computer with an

upset face ;-)

Create your own spreadsheets & functions

Make your time 100% productive

Learn from “real life” examples

Download numerous useful spreadsheets ready to use

This is an evolving eBook. This means that buy purchasing the eBook; you

will receive updated versions (probably once a year) with additional

content and other bonuses. All this for no additional charges!

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40 Download “Taking Your Excel Skills to

Another Level”

How much is it? Only $9.95

Why You Should Buy Now

Microsoft Excel is in a way like a

human brain, as most of us only use a

tiny part of it. Why? Mostly because we do not know enough about

everything that is possible. This eBook is meant to share with you the

summaries of my answers to hundreds of different excel related questions

that were asked on this website,

“Your eBook was great. I’ve been looking for ways to improve my excel skills

for months and I feel like I am now making significant progress” – Anton

Download “Taking Your Excel Skills to Another Level”

Then again, if you need me for any questions don’t be shy and send me an

email!

Best,

Pete

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