www.businessinsider.com: VLOOKUP is a commonly used search function that lets you look up a value in one table and use it in another. It takes its name from the fact that it performs a "vertical lookup" — it searches a specified column vertically for a search key and then returns the value you're looking for from the same row.
3 comments:
I’m not quite sure why I read this article it really wasn’t something I needed or wanted but I just kind of assumed it would have more advanced information than, this is how you do a v-lookup. To me V-lookups are apart of the basic set of excel functions at this point, there the bar in which employers and companies see someone as “proficient” in excel. If you want to be considered any more advanced than that then you need to learn and expand your function library. Recently I’ve been trying to find alternatives to V-lookups to do just that and exploring the world of IF functions combined with lookups and index’s so that I can manage more data sets. This all being said I find it funny that sometimes I work with people who are more experienced excel users than I and some of them tend to just Copy and paste using filters to get out the information. I don’t know but I feel like it’s all to their own with excel and whatever functions make your life easier is what works for you maybe not everyone else.
I clicked on this article because I was like, "Oh, hey! This is stuff that we're doing in Production Resource Management!" I wasn't very proficient in Excel or Sheets before (not that I am now, but I'm definitely better), but PRM is honestly one of my most fun classes, learning all this Excel and Access and data tracking methodology (although the grading is getting me a little down, ha). The problem with me using functions like VLOOKUP and others with more than, like, three arguments is that I start to lose track of things. In PRM, a lot of the functions are functions wrapped in functions wrapped in more functions, and then my brain really starts to slip because if I click out of my function bar to check my references, it fucks up the whole line and I have to go back and reformat or I just lose track of what I'm writing down. Hopefully I'll get better at it the more I do it.
The ability to look up data using either a VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP in both sheets and excel really defines a new level of using spreadsheet software. Similar to what Mattox said, it is very much the standard for being considered a proficient user who is able to do more than simple sorting and formulas. Spreadsheet software is extremely powerful when you start to add these functions, and as we've seen in PRM you can start to do some crazy analysis. In another structural design class, for example, we can use these to find the least weight beam for a given loading situation since we can use sorted lists to find the smallest beam that satisfies the index parameter in the formula. One thing that I wish Google sheets would do would be to incorporate the newer XLOOKUP from excel, which in my opinion is vastly simpler to use and much more robust, since you don't have to rely on counting columns to get your result. I like this article though as a quick reference on how to do various operations, like using wildcard characters. Overall, however, there wasn't anything too revealing in this article that isn't covered in our other classes.
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