The first Excel feature we'll review is lookups.

In this video I'll introduce the VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP functions and

discuss when to use them.

Let's look at an example spreadsheet that shows median housing rental prices for

counties in Texas.

In the first tab, Median Rental $, you can see we have columns for county, state, and

then the median price for zero, one, two, three and four bedroom rental properties.

On the second tab, Population & Units, you'll see we have population and

number of housing units for each county.

Now what if we wanted to add population and housing units to the rental price tab?

If the counties were in the same order on both tabs, we could just do a copy and

paste.

But doing a quick check, it's clear the counties are not in the same order, so

we'll need to do a lookup instead.

Even if the counties are in the same order, I'd still prefer the lookup method

here, as you're less likely to make a mistake using the lookup function.

In Excel the lookup functions searches for a value in one column or row and

then returns a value in the same column or row.

In other words, lookup is a conditional search that

would return a value based on the conditions you set.

There are two different types of lookups, a VLOOKUP and an HLOOKUP.

The V in VLOOKUP stands for vertical, so it will do a search and find in a column.

And H, in HLOOKUP stands for horizontal, or a search and find in a row.

Since our data is organized in columns, we'd wanna use a VLOOKUP.

And I'll show you how to that in the next video