Step-by-Step VLOOKUP Tutorial with Real-Life Business Examples

Introduction

If you’ve ever handled a large spreadsheet, you know how frustrating it can be to manually search for information. That’s where VLOOKUP comes in. VLOOKUP in Excel allows you to find data in a table quickly and return relevant values in seconds. Whether you’re in sales, HR, finance, or education, VLOOKUP can save hours of work. In this tutorial, we’ll break down how to use VLOOKUP step by step, and we’ll cover real-life business examples so you can apply it immediately in your workplace.

Understanding the VLOOKUP Formula

The basic structure of the VLOOKUP formula is:

=VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])

Where:

lookup_value → The value you want to search for.
table_array → The range of data that contains the information.
col_index_num → The column number of the value to return.
range_lookup → TRUE for approximate match, FALSE for exact match.

Example: Searching for a product price by entering its product ID.

Step 1: Setting Up the Data

Let’s start with a simple business dataset:

Product ID	Product Name	Price	Stock
101	Laptop	$800	20
102	Mouse	$25	150
103	Keyboard	$45	80
104	Monitor	$200	40

Suppose you want to find the price of Product ID 103.