If we wanted to retrieve the Department we would use 2, as Department is the 2nd column of the table_array).
The purpose of this post is to teach you how to use VLOOKUP.
Personally, I think it is because VLOOKUP is probably the most advanced function the interviewer knows! It is certainly not the most advanced function, but you need to know it if you want to use Excel to any reasonable standard. It is used in job interviews all over the world to understand a person’s skills with Excel. You could use VLOOKUP to find the telephone number of any employee based on their name.īeing able to use VLOOKUP correctly is an Excel ability benchmark. A simple example would be a where you had a long list of employees and their telephone numbers. It allows you to look up a value from a table based on a search term. VLOOKUP is one of the most powerful functions in Excel.