Need Help Understanding how to look up sentences.

**afmccombs** · 03-12-2015, 10:14 PM

Hello,

So say that I have a table with

1 This is the sentence that goes here1
2 This is the sentence that goes here2
3 This is the sentence that goes here3
4 This is the sentence that goes here4

That as a managed name of Table, and the in cell A3 = This is the sentence that goes here3

Say that if I was to use Vlookup like so

=VLOOKUP(A3,Table,1,0)

I would get the result of 3, but all that comes back is #N/a. I don't know if this is the correct function that I need to use. Any thing that you could think of would be great.

The reason that I need this is for an assessment and I want it to look up the point value for that option, the options are sentence. Like No assistance required with personal grooming. When I select that option I would like it to return its point value of 0.

**mohammadamjad48** · 03-13-2015, 12:03 AM

i think you use the lookup formula like this
=LOOKUP(A1,A:A,B:B)

**FDibbins** · 03-13-2015, 12:12 AM

Hi, welcome to the forum

vlookup cannot (generally) "look behind itself", meaning that the column containing your search criteria, needs to be the left-most column of your search range. If it is not, then you coulld use something like this...

=INDEX(A1:A4,match(A3,B1:B4,0))

Where A1:A4 are those numbers
B1:B4 contains your text