Excel Lookup Formulas

Lookup formulas find a value in one place and bring back a related value from somewhere else: a price for a product code, a name for an employee ID, a rate for a date. Most spreadsheets that pull data together depend on one.

Start with VLOOKUP if you are on an older version of Excel or sharing files with people who are. Use XLOOKUP in Microsoft 365 and Excel 2021 or later: it looks left as well as right, returns a default instead of #N/A, and handles exact and approximate matches without a sorted table. INDEX MATCH works in every version and is the usual choice when you need two-way or multi-criteria lookups.

The tutorials below cover multiple criteria, partial and wildcard matches, closest matches, returning several results, and fixing the errors lookups most often throw.