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Lookup Multiple Values in Excel

In this tutorial, we will use Excel formulas to lookup multiple values and combine the results into a single cell, or row. We will also order the returned values in two different ways.

The formulas used in this tutorial are only available in Excel 365 and Excel Online. They take advantage of the array engine of modern Excel. This video show you how to lookup multiple values in all Excel versions.

Watch the video below, or read on. This tutorial covers three examples of a lookup formula to return multiple values.

Lots of information, so let’s dive into the action.

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Create a Picture Lookup in Excel

Many Excel users are familiar with lookup functions such as VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH to look up information in a list. But how about performing a picture lookup in Excel to return a picture dependent upon the contents of a cell.

This requires a little extra thought as a standard VLOOKUP is not capable of returning a picture from a list.

In this blog post, we will explore how to create a picture lookup. We will look at how to return the picture of a flag dependent upon the country name that is selected from a list.

Spreadsheet Setup

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Count the Number of Words in a Cell

Working recently at a large Internet company they needed to find how many words were in a cell. This was because they had imported hundreds of thousands of keywords that customers had used to find their site through search engines.

To analyse this data they wanted to count how many words were in each cell containing keyword searches. Excel provides many text functions for managing and manipulating the text in the cells of your spreadsheet. The following formula did the job.

=LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2),” “,””))+1

This formula subtracts a version of the cell without spaces between each word from a version still with spaces. This finds out how many spaces there are. There will be one less space than there are words so the resulting answer has a 1 added to it to find how many words there are.

The LEN function is used to find how many text characters are in the cell.
The SUBSTITUTE function is used to replace the spaces between each word with nothing making one long word.

The TRIM function is used to remove any spaces at the beginning or end of the cell content. This cleanses the cell of any erroneous spaces put in by user error, or error on import.

Count the number of words in a cell
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Excel VLOOKUP Trick – No More Counting Columns

In this post, we look at a neat Excel VLOOKUP trick to select a column for the data to return instead of specifying a column index number.

This is one of the biggest frustrations for beginners to VLOOKUP and for users who work with wide data sets. Counting the columns to enter the correct index number is not ideal.

Well, this simple trick removes that hassle and will mean you only have to click the column now. Let’s see how to do this.

Watch the Video

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