#vlookup tutorial

Tutorial: How to use vlookup to add financial / fiscal year (U.S. Date Format)

It’s simple enough to group our data by calendar year in a pivot or using the YEAR() function but often we need to group data by financial year. Financial year start dates vary by geography and by company. This tutorial will show you how to add financial year labels to your data based on your date criteria. Follow along in the Financial Year Tutorial (US Dates).

Example Financial Year Vlookup…

Tutorial: Vlookup and the Wildcard Characters (* and ?) for partial matches

There are two wildcard characters in Excel:

an asterisk (*) which matches one or more characters, and

a question mark (?) matches a single character.

To use the asterisk character, we’ll use student names and numbers as a worked example.

In the first case (Cell B4 below), we’ll show that a standard vlookup can be used and the asterisk (*) can be used in the SearchFor cell B4

In the second case,…

How do I do a vlookup in VBA?

There are two ways that you might want to use this. Either (1) putting a vlookup in a cell or (2) using a vlookup to return a value in another way such as a message box.

This post assumes a basic knowledge of excel vba and macros.

Here’s an example list of names and results in columns A and B respectively.

(1) We’re going to use VBA to put a vlookup formula into cell F2

Press Alt + F11 to get…

How do I use vlookup to test simply whether or not a value exists in another list?

In the following example we want to test for a value in a list but we just want to check that it’s there, not return any corresponding value. This is a good way to find out how many values in one list appear in another.

  Using our standard construction of a vlookup formula:

=vlookup ( SearchFor , WhereToSearch , WhichColumn , NearOrExact )

The SearchFor value will be cell C1

WhereToSearchwill…