what are v look ups?

Hi Tamara,

vlookup stands for vertical look up. It looks for a unique value in a named range and returns the related figure in the desired column of that range.

for instance if you have a list of people's names and they all have a unique 'number' (userID for instance) the table may look like this in sheet 1


A B C
1 Joe Bloggs
2 John Smith
3 Peter Clarke
4 Tamara Jones
5 Jenny Meredith

in a different sheet, you may want to type in the userID and in the cell next to where you type userID (cell F1 for instance), you want excel to automatically look up that user's surname.

to do this, the formula you should type is as follows:

=VLOOKUP(F1,Sheet1!A:C,3,0)

each step is as follows

look up the value that is in cell F1 in the table in columns A - C in sheet 1, return the 3rd column in the table (column C) and return an exact match.

Hope this helps
Paul