Microsoft Office

Creating Formulas That Look Up Values 15
When a Blank Is Not a Zero
The Excel lookup functions treat empty cells in the result range as zeros. The worksheet in the accompanying
figure contains a two-column lookup table, and this formula looks up the name in cell B1 and returns
the corresponding amount:
=VLOOKUP(B1,D2:E8,2)
Note that the Amount cell for Charlie is blank, but the formula returns a 0.
If you need to distinguish zeros from blank cells, you must modify the lookup formula by adding an IF function
to check whether the length of the returned value is 0. When the looked up value is blank, the length of
the return value is 0. In all other cases, the length of the returned value is non-zero. The following formula displays
an empty string (a blank) whenever the length of the looked-up value is zero and the actual value whenever
the length is anything but zero:
=IF(LEN(VLOOKUP(B1,D2:E8,2))=0,””,(VLOOKUP(B1,D2:E8,2)))
Alternatively, you can specifically check for an empty string, as in the following formula:
=IF(VLOOKUP(B1,D2:E8,2)=””,””,(VLOOKUP(B1,D2:E8,2)))
The INDEX function returns a cell from a range. The syntax for the INDEX function is
INDEX(array,row_num,column_num)
The INDEX function’s arguments are as follows:
n
n
n
NOTE
array: A range
row_num: A row number within array
col_num: A column number within array
If array contains only one row or column, the corresponding row_num or column_num argument
is optional.
Figure 15.5 shows a worksheet with dates, day names, and amounts in columns D, E, and F. When you
enter a date in cell B1, the following formula (in cell B2) searches the dates in column D and returns the
corresponding amount from column F. The formula in cell B2 is
=INDEX(F2:F21,MATCH(B1,D2:D21,0))
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