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Excel VLOOKUP Practice Question: Find the department of the employee ID typed in E2 and put it in F2.

By Rinkesh Shah, founder of Cellgrids.

The question

Find the department of the employee ID typed in E2 and put it in F2.

The data

	A	B	C	E	F
1	ID	Name	Dept	ID	Dept
2	E-201	Asha	Finance	E-205	?
3	E-202	Ben	Sales
4	E-203	Chitra	HR
5	E-204	Dev	IT
6	E-205	Esha	Sales
7	E-206	Farah	IT

The yellow cell is where your answer goes.

Show answer

Answer in F2: Sales

How it works

Explanation: VLOOKUP can return text just as well as numbers. The column number counts from the first column of the table.
Syntax: =VLOOKUP(E2,A2:C7,3,FALSE)
E-205 is Esha. Dept is the 3rd column, so the result is Sales.

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VLOOKUP syntax

=VLOOKUP(lookup_value, table_array, col_index_num, [range_lookup])

Looks up a value in the first column of a range and returns a value from another column, same row. Pulling an employee's salary into another sheet using their ID. Full VLOOKUP guide.