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General discussion

excel formula similar to vlookup

Oct 12, 2010 9:28PM PDT

Hi All,
I search a formular similar to vlookup.
I have columns for month / performance / year-performance etc.

In a seperate cell, I enter manually the month I want to gather information from.

So what I want to do is to enter e.g. "July" and have the excel searching in all columns beginning from start (always the same) until the row with the July values.
If I enter "August", I want it to do the same but of course including the row with August numbers etc.

Using below simple example, I want Excel to tell me the maximum value of column "val2" from a fixed start date (here 01.01.2010) until a specified end date (written down in a seperate cell). So if I specify March as end date, result should be 6%, If I specify "April", result should be 7%

thanks,
sandra

Example:
date val 1 val 2
01.01.2010 1 6%
01.02.2010 3 2%
01.03.2010 2 5%
01.04.2010 5 7%

Discussion is locked

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Re: formula
Oct 13, 2010 4:28AM PDT

To start with, vlookup isn't a formula, it's a function.

Anyway, I don't think there's a way to do this without writing a custom function.
Then the target cell contains something like =myOwnMaxFunction(a1,$c$1:$d$12)

Kees

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If this were me
Oct 13, 2010 8:30PM PDT

I would try the MATCH function.

I've tried it myself for lookup values. "The MATCH function is a special type of lookup function in Microsoft Excel that will search for a given entry in a table and return the relative row or column position of that value."

I then use that value to display corresponding values in the next cells. More info here;
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/25577.aspx

I might also use the MAX function;
http://www.msoffice-tutorial-training.com/excel-max-function.html

Using a combination of those in an IF statement I can usually get what I need.

Do they help?

Mark