Going Beyond VLOOKUP in Excel

Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, explains helpful ways you can improve the integrity of your spreadsheets using Excel’s lookup functions. The presentation leads with a comparison of exact and approximate matches with VLOOKUP, and then comparisons to the HLOOKUP and LOOKUP functions. The presentation then covers a variety of troubleshooting techniques for VLOOKUP, and wraps up with a discussion of other alternatives such as MATCH/INDEX, SUMIF, and SUMIFS.

David demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Office 365 version of Excel. David draws your attention to any differences in the older versions of Excel (2019, 2016, 2013, and earlier) during the presentation as well as in his detailed handouts. David also provides an Excel workbook that includes most of the examples he uses during the webcast.

Office 365 is a subscription-based product that provides new-feature updates as often as monthly. Conversely, the perpetual licensed versions of Excel have feature sets that don’t change. Perpetual licensed versions have year numbers, such as Excel 2019, Excel 2016, and so on.

Who should attend:

Practitioners who can benefit by using a variety of lookup functions to work more efficiently in Excel.

Topics covered:

• Using the MATCH function to find the position of an item in a list.
• Utilizing Excel’s IFERROR function to display alternate values when VLOOKUP returns an error.
• Removing the Table feature from a worksheet if it’s no longer needed.
• Contrasting the INDEX and MATCH combination to VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP.
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets with Excel’s VLOOKUP function.
• Avoiding the complexity of nested IF statements with Excel’s CHOOSE function.
• Future-proofing VLOOKUP by using Excel’s Table feature versus referencing static ranges.
• Contrasting the INDEX and MATCH combination to VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP.
• Enabling VLOOKUP to look up data from the left (instead of only from the right) by using the CHOOSE function.
• Transforming numbers stored as text into values by way of the Text to Columns wizard.
• Learning about the IFNA function available in Excel 2013 and later.
• Identifying situations where VLOOKUP may return #N/A instead of a value.