Lookups — Excel Course

VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH and XMATCH. Learn it step by step with guided practice on Excelquro.

Understand

A lookup has four questions: what key do I know, where should Excel search, what should it return, and what should happen if no match exists? XLOOKUP separates lookup and return arrays; VLOOKUP depends on a leftmost lookup column and a column index; INDEX/MATCH separates position-finding from retrieval.

Worked example

F2 contains the employee ID. XLOOKUP searches the ID column and returns the matching Branch from column C.

=XLOOKUP(F2,A2:A5,C2:C5,"Not Found")

Follow along

  1. Identify the key and verify it is unique.
  2. Build an exact-match XLOOKUP.
  3. Add a not-found message.
  4. Recreate the same retrieval with VLOOKUP.
  5. Compare the formulas and identify VLOOKUP’s left-to-right limitation.
  6. Use INDEX/MATCH or XMATCH when you need explicit position logic.

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