From the course: Mastering Lookup Functions in Excel: Seven Powerful Formulas
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HLOOKUP pros and cons - Microsoft Excel Tutorial
From the course: Mastering Lookup Functions in Excel: Seven Powerful Formulas
HLOOKUP pros and cons
- [Instructor] We just learned about our second lookup function. And like the first lookup function, there are both pros and cons when you look at HLOOKUP. Let's start with the pros. HLOOKUP, like VLOOKUP is very simple to use. All you need is your lookup value, range, row index, and match type. The name is also pretty intuitive, but those are really my only notes on why I suggest you use HLOOKUP because like VLOOKUP, there are a lot of limitations with this function. For starters, I can only look up the value going down from where my range starts. Now that may not be too big of a deal since the majority of the time you'll want to start with a header in a table. But a bigger issue for me is the fact that I need to specify a row index here manually, and I may not have the visibility at all times into what this row represents. Similarly, I can only look up information in one direction going from left to right. What if I wanted to switch back to a vertical lookup or even better, perform…
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