How do you create a vlookup function for a product type?

Answer 1

You first need to set up a table. You could have a column with product codes and a column with the product description. To keep it simple, say you had a product table with 10 products. In the cells from B2 to B11, you could have the codes. In the cells C2 to C11 you could have the name of the product. The codes should be in alphabetical or numerical order. VLOOKUP will search down that column and when it finds a code it will jump to the second column to the cell beside the code and display the product code. You could then type a code into a blank cell and get the VLOOKUP to display the product description. Say you type your code into cell B15. The VLOOKUP function would be in another cell, say C15, and it would be like this:

=VLOOKUP(B15,B2:C11,2)

You can make a larger table with more products and even add other columns, such as price in a third column, say column D. To get the price, the table would now go to column D and the 2 at the end of the example above would be a 3, to indicate the third column like this:

=VLOOKUP(B15,B2:D11,3)