Continuing on with our “What’s inside Excel Everest?”, which showcases the introductory, “why is this important?” paragraphs found within Excel Everest.

…why is it important to learn?…

Vlookup

The vlookup formula is one of the most important formulas to learn in Excel. It’s a bit confusing at first, but once you master it, you’ll be known on the team as the “one who can do the vlookups” and it will save you so much time in the future. If you pick one formula to get fully acquainted with, it should probably be the vlookup.

The concept behind the vlookup is relatively simple but not easy to teach: you use it if you have a dataset full of information and need to pull in another piece of data based off the current data. This will become clearer soon. How many times, for instance, have you had a dataset that lacked one essential piece of information? For instance, you may have a list of people’s names but are missing their office locations. The vlookup allows you to pull that in, as well other information from any other data set.