How to vlookup on a vlookup in Excel?
Vlookup is a function that allows you to look up a value in a table based on a matching value in the first column. Sometimes I want to look up a value based on another value that is also looked up from a different table. In that case, I use Vlookup inside a Vlookup. To do that you can follow steps I defined:
Prepare the Vlookup formula
Use the first Vlookup to find the value that you want to use as the lookup value for the second Vlookup. To look up the email address of a person based on their name, and the name is stored in another table with their ID, you can use the first Vlookup to find the ID based on the name.
Prepare the second Vlookup
Use the second Vlookup to find the value that you want to return based on the value returned by the first Vlookup. To look up the email address of a person based on their ID, and the ID is the first column of a table that contains the email addresses, you can use the second Vlookup to find the email address based on the ID.
Nest Vlookup formulas
To effectively use one VLOOKUP within another, insert the first VLOOKUP function as the lookup_value parameter in the second VLOOKUP. In this approach, the initial VLOOKUP retrieves the ID associated with a name from the first table. Subsequently, the second VLOOKUP utilizes this ID to find the corresponding email in a second table. The formula is:
=VLOOKUP(VLOOKUP(A2,B2:C10,2,FALSE),D2:E20,2,FALSE)
A2 is the name. B2:C10 is the table with names and IDs. D2:E20 is the table with IDs and emails. 2 is the column with the ID or email. FALSE means exact match.
This is how in use vlookup on a vlookup. Nesting Vlookups helps me to build more advanced vlookup formulas to retrieve the data I need.
