Introducing Lookup Functions

The first Excel feature we'll review is lookups. 0:00 In this video I'll introduce the VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP functions and 0:03 discuss when to use them. 0:07 Let's look at an example spreadsheet that shows median housing rental prices for 0:09 counties in Texas. 0:13 In the first tab, Median Rental $, you can see we have columns for county, state, and 0:14 then the median price for zero, one, two, three and four bedroom rental properties. 0:21 On the second tab, Population & Units, you'll see we have population and 0:27 number of housing units for each county. 0:32 Now what if we wanted to add population and housing units to the rental price tab? 0:34 If the counties were in the same order on both tabs, we could just do a copy and 0:39 paste. 0:43 But doing a quick check, it's clear the counties are not in the same order, so 0:44 we'll need to do a lookup instead. 0:48 Even if the counties are in the same order, I'd still prefer the lookup method 0:50 here, as you're less likely to make a mistake using the lookup function. 0:54 In Excel the lookup functions searches for a value in one column or row and 0:59 then returns a value in the same column or row. 1:03 In other words, lookup is a conditional search that 1:07 would return a value based on the conditions you set. 1:10 There are two different types of lookups, a VLOOKUP and an HLOOKUP. 1:14 The V in VLOOKUP stands for vertical, so it will do a search and find in a column. 1:19 And H, in HLOOKUP stands for horizontal, or a search and find in a row. 1:25 Since our data is organized in columns, we'd wanna use a VLOOKUP. 1:30 And I'll show you how to that in the next video 1:34