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Vlookup to the Left with Index and Match function


What if your lookup value is to the right of the information that you want VLOOKUP to return? Conventional wisdom says VLOOKUP cannot handle a negative column number in order to go left of the key.

You are looking up names and want the department. But the lookup table has Department on the left and Name on the Right. It would be nice if you could =VLOOKUP(A2,Table,-1,False) but you can not specify -1 as the column to return.

One solution is =VLOOKUP(I7,CHOOSE({1,2},G1:G5,F1:F5),2,0). However, I prefer to use MATCH to find where the name is located and then use INDEX to return the correct value.

The solution is to use INDEX and MATCH. =INDEX($D$4:$D$11,MATCH(A2,$E$4:$E$11,0)).

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