APPLYING VERTICAL LOOKUP IN MICROSOFT EXCEL

In this blog, I’ll be writing on how to use vertical lookup in Excel.

Photo Credit: Google

• Lookup functions perform a rough match lookup either in one row or one column range and return the corresponding value from another one row or one column range.
• Lookup value is the value that you want to search for.
• VLookup function which stands for vertical lookup is used when you need to extract data from a table based on a particular value.
• Assuming you have to lookup for the price of a particular product in an Excel spreadsheet, it will be very easy for you to manually search if the dataset is a very small one, but will be very difficult when dealing with real life scenarios where you have to deal with very large datasets. This is where lookups come in very handy. We will look at an example depicting how to use vlookup when working with a very large dataset.
• The dataset I will be using in this write-up was gotten from Kaggle named wine rating and price (link to the dataset will be given below the write-up)
• After extracting the zip file, there were five datasets in total, I used the dataset titled Red.
• The dataset contains 8 columns and 8,667 rows and the task is to get the price of wine named Rully Red 2017. Below are the steps to take:

1. Write the name of the wine to be searched for in a stand alone cell in the spreadsheet (Rully Red 2017). (In my case, the cell I wrote the wine name is Cell K3)
2. In a new cell where you want the price found to be pasted, write the formula: = VLOOKUP(K3, A1:H8667, 7, FALSE)

Picture depicting VLookup formula

• A1: H8667 represents the total original data in the spreadsheet without the stand alone cells created.
• 7 represents the column index number of Price column (Price column is located in column G which is 7 in number).
• False symbolizes exact match while True symbolizes approximate match, we need an exact match hence we use False.

3. If the formula is written correctly, you will get the exact price of the wine.

PS: This formula that has been written will automatically get you the price of any other wine so far the wine name is typed inside the K3 cell.

For crosschecking the price with the price the VLookup function gave, you can check row 1133 (where Rully Red 2017 is located)

Link to dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/budnyak/wine-rating-and-price

If while learning, you feel the need to ask questions for clarity, you can send me a mail @marybajisma123@gmail.com or contact 09021833246.