Introduction to Excel Lookup Functions

In this comprehensive presentation, Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, introduces you to several lookup functions, including VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH, and CHOOSE. These powerful Excel functions allow you to rapidly develop accurate spreadsheets and look up information, such as pay rates, item prices, and accounting results, versus manually linking to specific cells. Step-by-step, David explains the context of when to use lookup functions, demonstrates troubleshooting techniques, and prepares you to deal with subtle issues that can prevent them from working properly.

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 Would Be Interested in This Course:
Practitioners who would like to learn how to implement a variety of lookup functions, which would allow them to work more efficiently in Excel.

Topics Covered:

• Comparing the MIN, SMALL, MAX, and LARGE functions.
  
• Employing the SUMIF function to sum values related to multiple instances of criteria you specify.
• Exploring why VLOOKUP sometimes returns #N/A instead of a desired result.
• Future-proofing VLOOKUP by referencing entire columns when available.
• Future-proofing VLOOKUP by using Excel’s Table feature versus referencing static ranges.
• Implementing Data Validation to ensure users make choices that VLOOKUP will recognize as valid.
• Improving the integrity of spreadsheets with Excel’s VLOOKUP function.
• Learning what types of user actions can trigger #REF! errors.
• Reconstructing spreadsheet data to use VLOOKUP as a better alternative to nesting IF functions.
• Simplifying multiple-field lookups with concatenation (combining fields into a single cell).
• Troubleshooting other errors VLOOKUP can present, such as #REF!, #NAME!, and #VALUE!.
• Understanding situations that cause Excel’s VLOOKUP function to return #REF! instead of a value.