I have a lookup table in Excel with ColA and ColB :
ColA ColB ColC
va 1 value1
ColC is the actual value table
I need to do a wildcard lookup with lookup_value = "value1"
I need to perform an operation that if the value of ColC matches the characters in ColA then it should return me ColB value, i.e. 1
I want to use wildcards in the lookup function to achieve this result.
Any help will be appreciated!
Thanks
You can use wildcards with VLOOKUP. You'll have to rearrange your table so that the lookup column is the first column, but other than that it should work. I put:
abc 1
def 2
ghi 3
jkl 4
into a range named "table"
Then:
g*
g?i
?kl
into F2:F4
Now, in G2:G4, I put this formula:
=VLOOKUP(F2,table,2,FALSE)
and it correctly found 3 in cells G2 & G3, and 4 in cell G4.
The asterisk means zero or more characters; the question mark means exactly one character.
This works as a wild card with text strings:
=vlookup("*"&REF&"*",lookup range, column, false)
It turns a number into text to do a wild card on a number. Stars should go between the quotations but they are not showing up.
You can do it this way:
=VLOOKUP(LOOKUP("value1",ColC:ColC,ColC:ColC), lookuprange, COLUMN(ColA) + 1, TRUE)
Of course you can simplify this with your domain knowledge.
This method allows you to use your lookup table as is.