vlookup doesn't work

Question

http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

on that Alexa domain ranking spreadsheet (top 1 million domains in the world)

A column contains domain ranking, B column contains domain name (for those not familiar)

On a D column, I put =VLOOKUP("dog",A1:B1000001,1,TRUE)

and it returns #N/A

How come Vlookup is not working ?

Using Excel 2007, Vista.

Answer 1

From VLOOKUP doctumentation

The V in VLOOKUP stands for vertical. Use VLOOKUP instead of HLOOKUP when your comparison values are located in a column to the left of the data that you want to find.

Table_array Two or more columns of data. Use a reference to a range or a range name. The values in the first column of table_array are the values searched by lookup_value. These values can be text, numbers, or logical values. Uppercase and lowercase text are equivalent.

From your formula, and the fact the the data in the sheet is ID, Value, this will try to match dog to an ID ( integer ) value, which should return no results.

Also, the sort order of the lookup values are important

The values in the first column of table_array must be placed in ascending sort order; otherwise, VLOOKUP may not give the correct value.

If RangeLookUp is set to FALSE

If FALSE, VLOOKUP will only find an exact match. In this case, the values in the first column of table_array do not need to be sorted.