Vlookup and Hlookup

P

Phlogiston2312

Does anybody know what vlookup and hlookup do, and how do you determin
the variables that need to be imputted into the formula. I read th
help, and it left me scratching my head, and seemed very cryptic.
What, if any is the "REAL WORLD" application of this function??
 
J

JulieD

Hi

this function is used all the time, often to overcome the limitations of the
IF statement ... for example, say you are creating an invoice workbook ..
you have all your products and their prices on sheet 2 ... on sheet 1 you
want to select the product the customer wants and have the price
automatically fill in ... this is where VLOOKUP comes in

the four parameters of VLOOKUP are (in my words):-
=VLOOKUP(thing_to_look_up,table_with_item_and_answer,column_number_of_answer,approx_match?)

so in my above example the cell reference of the product the customer wants
on sheet 1 (say A5) is my "thing_to_look_up"
sheet 2 columns A & B (where i have my products & prices) is the
"table_with_item_and_answer"
column B has the information i want returned by the formula, so 2 (2nd
column of table) is my "column_number_of_answer"
and
as i want an exact match i type 0 or FALSE in the fourth parameter ...
giving me
=VLOOKUP(A5,Sheet2!$A$2:$B$500,2,0)

the HLOOKUP works the same way, except that instead of having the data in
two columns i have it in two rows, top row is the product and 2nd row is the
price (but as there's only 256 columns i'ld have problem as i've got 499
products).

hope this makes some sense.
 
Top