The taxman is after the company I work for for our out-of-state purchases. I have an excel workbook that contains:
[ol]
[li]a list of vendors we purchased from in 2016[/li][li]a list of vendors we purchased from in 2017[/li][li]all vendors ever, plus addresses[/li][/ol]
I want to take the address columns from list 3 and match them with the appropriate vendors on lists 1 and 2. Does Excel have a formula or shortcut to do that? VLOOKUP, maybe?
Thanks in advance!
VLOOKUP will do it. You’ll need your lookup list to be sorted alphabetically by whatever field you’re looking for (I assume vendor name). If that’s going to be a problem for you consider Index, Match. It’s a little less intuitive but doesn’t have that restriction:
The lookup list does not have to be sorted at all to use either vlookup or hlookup. Just ensure that the last argument for the function, or match mode, is FALSE.
This is correct.
The only time that data needs to be sorted for either VLOOKUP or MATCH is if you want to find the nearest match if an exact match cannot be found. If you require an exact match (and it sounds like you do), then the fourth argument to VLOOKUP is FALSE and the third argument to MATCH is 0.