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Excel VLOOKUP Practice Question: Using VLOOKUP with a wildcard, find the price of the first laptop in the list…

By Rinkesh Shah, founder of Cellgrids.

The question

Using VLOOKUP with a wildcard, find the price of the first laptop in the list whose name starts with Dell and put it in D2.

The data

	A	B	D
1	Model	Price	Dell price
2	Dell XPS 15	1500	?
3	HP Spectre	1400
4	Dell Inspiron	800
5	Lenovo T14	1100
6	Asus Zen	900

The yellow cell is where your answer goes.

Show answer

Answer in D2: 1500

How it works

Explanation: A wildcard lets you look up part of a name. VLOOKUP returns the first row that matches, here Dell XPS 15.
Syntax: =VLOOKUP("Dell*",A2:B6,2,FALSE)
"Dell*" matches Dell XPS 15 first (Dell Inspiron comes later). Its price in column 2 is 1500.

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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.