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Excel MVPs celebrate VLOOKUP Week

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13th Apr 2012
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It all started when spreadsheet guide Bill Jelen (aka MrExcel) declared that 25-31 March would be VLOOKUP Week.

Perhaps because the idea has happened before (Chandoo staged a similar online event in 2010), the Excel MVP community responded enthusiastically with several others weighing in with their contributions. The Microsoft Excel Blog team got in on the act and reported that VLOOKUP Week took on a life of its own.

“Bill finds himself with VLOOKUP t-shirts, coffee mugs, and a theme song and logo,” the blog reported.

A shark was selected as the logo for VLOOKUP week because VLOOKUP “strikes terror into the hearts of Excel beginners”, reported Debra Dalgleish on her Contextures blog, which celebrated the occasion by demonstrating how the function could be used to analyse shark attack data in the USA.

Since lookups are one of the most popular topics in ExcelZone, we thought we’d join in the fun too. If you fancy an afternoon (or weekend?) of VLOOKUP education and exploration, here are some of the goodies available:

If this collection has got you excited about Excel lookup techniques, but made you regret that you didn’t hear about VLOOKUP Week in time, don’t despair. The response was so overwhelming that Bill Jelen announced, “We’re going to need a bigger week!” In the world of Excel MVPs, VLOOKUP Week goes on forever.

Have a look at the resources available, and let us know if we've missed any of your favourite VLOOKUP tricks.

Replies (2)

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By 0310533
16th Apr 2012 17:40

VLookup Left

Richard great formula. How did you get the curly brackets (for the array formula) into the formula

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By RichardSchollar
28th Apr 2012 16:50

Curly braces

The curly braces around the first argument of CHOOSE:

{1,2}

are typed in manually from the keyboard - this tells Excel that the {1,2} is an array constant.  The VLOOKUP does not require Ctrl+Shift+Enter entry that a CSE formula would.

Regards

Richard

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