For all you beginner Excel babes looking to move up a level, Vlookups are a great way to do that. Every job interview I’ve done has asked if I knew how to use this function and it wasn’t until I started doing them at my current job that I really understood what I was doing.

Vlookups are used to quickly pull an answer to a question from a data set. For example, if I wanted to know how many items were on a specific order number, I could find that information using a vlookup.

I don’t go into Hlookups in this tutorial because they are almost the exact same thing. Vlookups are vertical lookups, meaning you’re referencing columns, and Hlookups are horizontal lookups where you would just reference rows. I have not had to deal with horizontal data in my career thus far and I may even be so bold to say that horizontal data would be rare to deal with.

So without further ado, here is how you use a VLOOKUP function.