If we were feeling really clever, we would create a database of all our customers in another worksheet, and then use the customer ID entered in cell F5 to automatically fill in the customer’s name and address in cells B6, B7 and B8. We would save the file as a template, so that it could be reused by everyone in our company.We would probably “lock” the cells that contain our formulae (or rather unlock the other cells), and then protect the worksheet, in order to ensure that our carefully constructed formulae are not accidentally overwritten when someone comes to fill in the invoice.The formula would change from this… =IF(ISBLANK(A11),””,VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE))…to this… =IF(ISBLANK(A11),””,VLOOKUP(A11,Products,2,FALSE))…and then copy the formulas down to the rest of the invoice item rows. In simple terms, the VLOOKUP function says the following to Excel: Look for this piece of information (e.g. Alternatively – and even better – we could create a range name for the entire product database (such as “Products”), and use this range name instead of the cell references. What is VLOOKUP in Excel The VLOOKUP Function in Excel is a tool for looking up a piece of information in a table or data set and extracting some corresponding data/information. We could fix this by changing the cell references for the database to absolute cell references. Note that if we do this, the resulting formulas will no longer correctly refer to the database table. We would copy the formulas in cells B11, E11 and F11 down to the remainder of the item rows of the invoice.We change our formula from this… =VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)…to this… =IF(ISBLANK(A11),””,VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) We can remedy this by judicious use of Excel’s IF() and ISBLANK() functions. This will cause our newly created VLOOKUP formulae to display error messages: We would remove the sample item code from cell A11 and the “2” from cell D11.The fourth argument is not bold, meaning that it’s optional: The first three arguments are shown in bold, indicating that they are mandatory arguments (the VLOOKUP function is incomplete without them and will not return a valid value). Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you?.What unique identifier are you looking up in the database? The VLOOKUP Function in Excel is a tool for looking up a piece of information in a table or data set and extracting some corresponding data/information.You can think of this box as the function asking us the following questions: The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function. ![]() The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel. To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function). A box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel.
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