When was vlookup invented

The results returned will be invalid if the array is not sorted appropriately. Let's start focusing on the mandatory arguments. See how easy it is? Now let's see how you can use those scary optional arguments to make some awesome formulas. But you can also return a value or a range. Below, all 3 optional arguments are used:.

This is very powerful, and a great time-saver if you need to get data from many columns. You would typically expect it to be C5:C14, but instead it's C5:D14, meaning that the results will come from both the C and D columns! This one has four options. The first three 0, 1 or -1 are similar to MATCH function and allow to perform an exact match, to get the next smallest value in case no match is found, or to get the next larger value in case no match is found.

Nothing new here. The fourth option is the wildcard character. This can be extremely helpful. Let's take an example. Imagine you want to search for a specific last name, in a list of full names. You will run a partial search, as shown below:. Now another example: suppose you want to search for a name, but you are unsure if it should be spelt with an "i" or an "y". You can use the question mark wildcard to specifiy that this character could take any value, like in the example below:.

You can learn more about them here. The default is 1 to search in first-to-last order, but you can use -1 to search from last-to-first. Replies 6 Views Oct 18, ollyhughes Replies 1 Views Oct 16, Fluff. Chlwls Sep 22, Excel Questions. Replies 2 Views Sep 22, Chlwls Solved Max with index match. Shree1 Aug 19, Excel Questions. Replies 3 Views Aug 20, Shree1. Replies 9 Views Sep 10, bobsan Forum statistics Threads 1,, Messages 5,, Members , Latest member fatman We've detected that you are using an adblocker.

And on a Reddit discussion board dedicated to accounting, people posted memes about the addition. Rhett Weller, a senior finance manager at Cisco , uses Excel to help predict revenue. It's currently only in beta with limited access for some people in the Microsoft Office Insider program. Microsoft will release it more widely in the next few weeks. Correction: A previous version of this story had a typo in the date of Excel's initial release. It was