Did you know that VLOOKUP actually looks down? That’s right, it finds the first entry from the top down. The default XLOOKUP also looks down, but can start from the bottom and look up.

If you are new to XLOOKUP, which most people are, check out these two previous XLOOKUP blog posts.

Part One  – XLOOKUP to the left

Part Two – XLOOKUP Flexibility

Things are looking up

Take the listing below. We want the last time that someone attended a webinar. Note the table is sorted in ascending date order.

As you can see names are duplicated in the right-hand column. Remember XLOOKUP can look up and to the left.

In the image above cell F2 has the following formula. This has been copied across to G2.

=XLOOKUP($E2,$C$2:$C$13,A2:A13,,,-1)

This XLOOKUP function finds the last entry for David De Silva in the range C2:C13 and returns the corresponding row from the range A2:A13. The -1 on the end is the argument (setting) that instructs XLOOKUP to start from the bottom of the range and look up the name.