How to turn Listobject into an Array

My spreadsheets use a lot of ListObjects (tables). This excellent article explains that importing data into an array is much faster than pulling it from the spreadsheet:

https://www.soa.org/News-and-Publica...s42-roper.aspx

I know I can make the array by saying:

Dim array1 as Variant 
array1 = ActiveSheet.ListObjects(1).DataBodyRange

I'm sure that this concept will help me a lot if I can just resolve these issues:

1. One of the things I like about ListObjects is how I can refer to a column by name such as:

 tblInfo.ListColumns("FirstName")  ' This is better than a column number because I may change the columns around. 
' But if I really need the column number, I can use:
 tblInfo.ListColumns("FirstName").Index

Is there a way to do that in an array?


2. I can find a specific value in the table with something like this:

ID = InputBox("Enter ID Number")

WorkerName = WorksheetFunction.VLookup(ID, tblInfo.Range, 2, False)

Is there a way to do that in an array?


3. How much data can the array hold reasonably? I have some tables with 17,000 rows and about a dozen columns.