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Friday, January 27, 2017

Reverse VLOOKUP with INDEX + MATCH

VLOOKUP() in Excel is one of the most powerful and famous formula. This function is very easy to use to lookup a value from a table or range. You just need to refer a key value to the column located at the most left column of the range to get result value from another column in the same row. I'll not discuss more on VLOOKUP function in this blog, you can easily Google it or watch from Youtube.

One of the requirement to use VLOOKUP, which is also limitation of VLOOKUP, is the key value must be located at the most left column in the range, but that is not always how is out data structured. What happen when the key value located at the right of the result value?

Options:
1. Move the Result or Key value column 
Move the Result value column to the right of Key value, or move Key value column to the left of Result value, then use VLOOKUP.
This may work easily, but sometimes when you work with many columns and many user, move column is not really a desired option.


2. Copy the Key or Result value
Copy Key or Result value to have Key value located before of Result value, then use VLOOKUP. Same with option 1, sometimes option to move column in big worksheet and work many user is not really a good option.


3. INDEX + MATCH function
The INDEX function returns a value in a table based on the intersection of a row and column position within that table. The first row in the table is row 1 and the first column in the table is column 1.
The MATCH function searches for a specified item in a range of cells, and then returns the relative position of that item in the range.

With combination of INDEX + MATCH functions, we can get something similar with VLOOKUP, but the Key not must be located before Result column, see this sample:


What is the formula in I2? =INDEX(A:A,MATCH(H2,B:B,0),1)


A:A = result / target value
B:B = key
H2 = data for row 2
I2 = target result



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