Combining If statement and vlookup

I am trying to look up a value and return the value in the next column, however if the lookup value does not appear, then lookup the value in a seperate column. I have excel 2003.

Hi Wildcat,

It's a little tricky to explain without sample data, but if you could use something like the following if your lookup value was in A1 (I'm searching for "a" in this example), and your data is in B1 and C1 (2 and 3, respectively).

If you wanted to return the second column when A1 is "a", but return the third column when A1 is not "a", you could use the following:

=IF(A1="a",VLOOKUP("a",A1:C1,2,FALSE),IF(A1<>"a",VLOOKUP(A1,A1:C1,3,FALSE)))

Hope that helps,
David

Thanks chemistB that worked great for me. If I wanted to search additional columns beyond the two, would I just add the additional vlookups to look at the additional columns, or would I have to add any other logic.

Thanks again.

Originally Posted by ChemistB

Probably need more info on your data setup. In any case, it will be something like this.....

= IF(ISNUMBER(MATCH(A1, Data!$A$1:$A$50,0)),VLOOKUP(A1, Data!$A$1:$B$50,2,FALSE),VLOOKUP(A1, Data!$A$52:$B$102,2,FALSE))
Does that work for you?

Maybe replacing the

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part with

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would make the calculation faster ? ( if needed)