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Excel INDEX Practice Question: Employees are in A2:C7 (name, ID, department). Employee IDs to find are in…

By Rinkesh Shah, founder of Cellgrids.

The question

Employees are in A2:C7 (name, ID, department). Employee IDs to find are in E2:E5. Show each person's name in G2:G5 using INDEX and MATCH, because the name is to the left of the ID.

The data

	A	B	C	E	G
1	Name	Emp ID	Department	Find ID	Name found
2	Amit Shah	E-101	Sales	E-105	?
3	Neha Verma	E-102	Finance	E-102	?
4	Rahul Mehta	E-103	IT	E-106	?
5	Priya Nair	E-104	HR	E-101	?
6	Karan Singh	E-105	Sales
7	Sneha Iyer	E-106	IT

The yellow cells are where your answer goes.

Show answer

Expected results:

G2 = Karan Singh
G3 = Neha Verma
G4 = Sneha Iyer
G5 = Amit Shah

How it works

Explanation: VLOOKUP cannot return a column to the left of the lookup column, but INDEX with MATCH can. MATCH finds the row, and INDEX returns the name from that row.
Syntax: =INDEX($A$2:$A$7,MATCH(E2,$B$2:$B$7,0))
E-105 is Karan Singh, E-102 is Neha Verma, E-106 is Sneha Iyer and E-101 is Amit Shah.

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INDEX syntax

=INDEX(array, row_num, [column_num])

Returns the value at a given row/column position within a range. Pulling the Nth item from a list — often paired with MATCH to look up in any direction. Full INDEX guide.