There are many situations in which you have a large set of data in a spreadsheet in Excel and you need to use lookup functions to try to find matching data within the larger set of data. So I'm going to show you how to use one-way lookup functions in this screencast. This is what we are going to be creating in this screencast. We've got some students here with their name. We have the student ID number. We have the homework 1, assignment score, homework 2, exam 1 score. Now you can imagine that this spreadsheet might be pretty big. We might have a lot of students or records here in rows. And then we've got a lot of different headings here in columns. And so this might actually be pretty big and it's nice to sort of have a lookup area over here where you kind of summarize things. The user can type in the name of the student here in cell H3. And it'll automatically spit out the student ID number, the homework 1 assignment, homework 2 assignment, score, and the exam 1 score. And then the nice thing about is the user can go into just cell H3, doesn't have to go through all the data one line at a time and can just type in a new student name. And it automatically updates those items. So that's why I'm going to show you how to do in this screencast. I've got this file available, student lookup. We're going to start from here and we're going to create that student lookup. The first thing I'm going to do is I want to convert this range A1 through E8 to in Excel tables. I just need to make sure that I have clicked somewhere in that table, going to go up to the Home tab and over here, Format as Table. And I'm just going to choose this nice green one as I always do. And then we can click OK and it converts it to an Excel table. The first thing I'm going to do is rename this. I'm just going to rename this data up here in the table name area, press enter, and we are ready to go. Now there is a VLOOKUP function in Excel for vertical lookup. This is from what I've heard the third most popular function in Excel. The VLOOKUP function has three required arguments and one optional argument. The first argument in the VLOOKUP function is what you are searching for. In this case, I'm looking for Jennifer. So that's going to be my lookup_value. And I'm going to go ahead and make that absolute because later on I'm going to drag this down through the different rows here. The second argument is the table_array that we are looking up and I named our table over here. I renamed it data. So that's what I'm looking through. Now this is really important. The VLOOKUP function is always looking for the lookup_value in the LEFT-MOST column of the second argument, which is in this case, data. So it's always looking through the LEFT-MOST column. The third argument is the col_index_num that we want output. In this cell H4, we want to output the student ID. That's actually the 2nd column of my data over here. So I'm going to put a 2 in there and finally, the last argument is optional. But if you want an exact match, you need to put in FALSE. If you only require an approximate match, you can put in TRUE. But for what I usually do, I'm putting in a, I want an exact match. So I put in FALSE and then I can press enter. And it has gone through, it's looked for Jennifer in the left-most column of our data array. And then it's output the second column of the data array, which in this case is that student ID number. Now the nice thing about this is I can change the name here and it automatically updates so it's a live solution. So let's go ahead and put it back to Jennifer. Now because I made the first argument of that VLOOKUP function an absolute reference, I can pull this down. And I'm just going to modify each of these. The only difference now, I'm not looking up the student ID number in row 5, but instead I'm looking up the homework 1 score, which is column 3 of the data. So I'm just going to replace this with 3, press enter. And that's looking up Jennifer's homework 1 score. I'm going to double click in H6, and I'm going to put a 4 here. And I'm going to do the same thing for exam 1. This is going to be our fifth column of our data array and I can press enter. And again, if I change this to somebody else on the table, then it's going to output the corresponding grades. Now the nice thing about this is if you put the name of somebody not on here, because I put that exact match, in other words, the last argument here on the VLOOKUP function is FALSE, that means it requires an exact match.