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If you do not know the meaning of a word, you can take out a dictionary and look up the word and get the meaning. Excel LOOKUP function does the similar thing. For example, you do not know the price associated with a product ID, you can use LOOKUP function to retrieve the price. Suppose you own a grocery store. You remember the product ID of carrot is 5423, but you do not remember the price. A LOOKUP function can help you. The formula is: =LOOKUP(F2, A2:A5, C2;C5) You enter the product ID in cell F2. It looks for the value in the data range of A2:A5, the return the corresponding value in data range C2:C5. For example, the product ID of 5423 is on row 4, the the unit price for row 4 is $1.25. Note: VLOOKUP is an improved version of LOOKUP. So use VLOOKUP instead of LOOKUP if possible.

This post is written by Yisong Geng, PhD at Calc LLC. If you need consulting services with Excel, please  contact us . VLOOKUP is one of the most commonly used Excel functions. VLOOKUP function asks for 4 things: The value you want to look up, such as name of a person The data range you want to search If the value is found in the data range, which column contains the value you want the function to return? Whether it is a approximate match or not. The default option is approximate match. This argument is optional and let's ignore it for now. The following table contains first name, last name and age of 4 people. Your task is to find the age of Jan Doe. It can be easily done using VLOOKUP function. The value you want to look up is "Jane", which is at cell "A3" The range of data you want to search, which is "A2:C5" Which column contains the value you want to retrieve? The "Age" is column C, so this argument is 3. The 4th argument is optional and...