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Intermediate Excel

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LOOKUP Tips and Common Errors

1:19 with Tyler Tallon

It’s easy to make mistakes when using a LOOKUP, so let’s discuss several tips to help you avoid some common pitfalls.

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Download the LOOKUPS spreadsheet to follow along. Remember, you'll learn best by doing this with me!

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    It's easy to make mistakes when using a lookup. 0:00
    So let's discuss several tips to help you avoid some common pitfalls. 0:03
    First, lookups always find the first match. 0:07
    So if the first column in your VLOOKUP range, the lookup value column 0:10
    contains duplicates then they will match the first instance. 0:14
    In a later video, 0:18
    I'll show you how to quickly highlight duplicates using conditional formatting. 0:19
    So in our example, if a county was listed twice in our table array, 0:24
    it would retrieve the data from the first one. 0:27
    Also be careful, if you insert or delete any rows, or 0:30
    columns after you have created a lookup, the row or column 0:34
    index number won't change automatically when columns are inserted or deleted. 0:38
    Finally if you get an N/A error, 0:43
    this means that no match was found which happens sometimes when using exact mode or 0:46
    false as the fourth command in the formula. 0:51
    In our example, 0:54
    this would happen if our first dataset had a county the second data set didn't have. 0:55
    Also numbers formatted as text can cause an N/A error. 1:01
    To make sure this doesn't happen make sure the first column of the range in 1:05
    the lookup value are both the same data type, both numbers or both text. 1:09
    These are just a few tips that I hope will help you out 1:14
    as you begin to use the lookup function. 1:16

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