Cross referencing 2 workbooks...

I've been reading up on how to cross reference 2 workbooks, and I've concluded that I'll need to likely use the VLOOKUP function. However; my excel experience is fairly limited, I've only used it a little since college, and now I'm trying to set up a function at work to make my days a little easier.

Essentially I'll have 2 workbooks that I need to cross reference by a policy number, this is one of two fields that will have the same data between the 2 sheets, and happens to be the more precise column to compare out of.

One sheet will be policies that haven't paid, and the other will be a large database of addresses. My co-worker who is leaving in the next few weeks has been manually cross referencing between the 2 sheets each time he needs to do a mailing.

What is the best way to set this up to pull the data and drop it into a brand new sheet using VLOOKUP?

Originally Posted by NBVC

Well, perhaps you should review Vlookup in Excel Help... it explains it well there.

your formula would be something like:

=Vlookup(A1,Sheet2!A:B,2,False)

where A1 is the lookup policy number

and Sheet2 contains table in A:B where column A has all policies and B has addresses to pull.

Okay, so I think I've got it somewhat, but what is the 2 for after A:B, ?

I think this is whats throwing me off...

Originally Posted by NBVC

The 2 is the column index number... ie. is the column number within the range A:B to get the items of interest from... so basically it refers to column B in this example.

ahh, okay, I got it now. Thank you!