I really like VLOOKUP, it has to be one of the most useful Excel functions that I use all the time. So I just had to ask myself how could I possibly make it more useful to me. With that in mind I have yet to find an instance where I don't use FALSE at the end; I'm sure there must be a good use for TRUE out there somewhere, but my fear that TRUE is "non-stable" has made me wary of using it altogeather, so if and when I really needed a stable nearest neighbor function I'll probably develop one at that time. Instead I went with a combination of both VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP that will do(I think) most of the odds'n'ends lookup requests I've seen posted on this forum from time to time. (that and I got tired of not being able to do negative columns in VLOOKUP)
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H/VLOOKUP/MATCH Equivelents:Standard VLOOKUP
=VLOOKUP("a",B1:C3,2,FALSE)
=nXLookup("a",B1:B3,0,1)
Contains VLOOKUP
=VLOOKUP("*A*",B1:C3,2,FALSE)
=nXLookup("A",B1:B3,0,1,,,,FALSE)
Standard HLOOKUP
=HLOOKUP("a",A1:C3,2,FALSE)
=nXLookup("a",A1:C1,1,0,,,,,FALSE)
Standard MATCH
=MATCH("b",B1:B3,0)
=ROW(nXLookup("b",B1:B3))
Non-Equivelents:VLOOKUP cannot go negative, and returns a value not a reference
=VLOOKUP("a",B1:C3,-1,FALSE)
=nXLookup("a",B1:B3,0,-1)
=OFFSET(nXLookup("a",B1:B3),0,-1)
VLOOKUP doesn't have a case sensitive option
=VLOOKUP("Q",A1:C3,3,FALSE)
=nXLookup("Q",A1:A3,0,2,,,,,,,TRUE)
VLOOKUP doesn't have an option to look in formulas, nor comments
=VLOOKUP("T",A1:C3,3,FALSE)
=nXLookup("T",A1:A3,0,2,,,2,FALSE)
=nXLookup("T",A1:A3,0,2,,,3,FALSE)
VLOOKUP cannot find the Nth Match, nor 4th out of 2 match
=VLOOKUP("A",B1:C3,2,FALSE)
=nXLookup("A",B1:B3,0,1,2)
=nXLookup("A",B1:B3,0,1,4,TRUE)
VLOOKUP doesn't have an option to start from the bottom up
=VLOOKUP("A",B1:C3,2,FALSE)
=nXLookup("A",B1:B3,0,1,,,,,,FALSE)
nXLookup cannot find "First Pigeon Hole?"
=VLOOKUP("Y",A1:C3,3,TRUE)
nXLookup can also do a "random table access lookup?"
=nXLookup("A",A1:C3,-1,-1,2)
=nXLookup("A",A1:C3,1,1,2)
Now if only I could get the parameter names to show when typing out the function into a cell I'd be golden.
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